CASUAL sy** SEA

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

GIFT OF

Estate of
Mary Kingsley

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CASUALS OF THE SEA

CASUALS OF THE SEA

THE VOYAGE OF A SOUL

By WILLIAM McFEE

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1916

DEDICATION

To those who live and toil and lowly die,

Who pass beyond and leave no lasting trace,
To those from whom our queen Prosperity

Has turned away her fair and fickle face;
To those frail craft upon the restless Sea

Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted,
Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily,

Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started;
To those poor Casuals of the way-worn earth,

The feckless wastage of our cunning schemes,
This book is dedicate, their hidden worth

And beauty I have seen in vagrant dreams!
The things we touch, the things we dimly see,

The stiff strange tapestries of human thought,
The silken curtains of our fantasy

Are with their sombre histories o'erwrought.
And yet we know them not, our skill is vain to find
The mute soul's agony, the visions of the blind.

V?7f'

GIFT

CONTENTS

PAGE

Book One: The Suburb ......./ ... * • 1

Book Two: The City 127

Book Three: The Sea . . .«. .• • • ■•■• >• • • 225

Mb09C2iJ

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

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BOOK ONE
THE SUBURB

Bringing up a family U no joke/

ABOUT twenty years ago, late in January, snow was
falling over North London. It fell for some hours
continuously ; " without intermission " the Evening
Star said, whose sub-editor lived in the neighbour-
hood ; and the said sub-editor sent his nephew, who was learning
the business, to the British Museum, to look up heavy snow-
falls from 1792 downwards. And by teatime the whole of North
London, from the Manor House to High Barnet Church, from
Hampstead Heath to Enfield Highway, was very white indeed.

At a few minutes past four in the afternoon the triangular
open common land, which is now the correct and asphalted
park called Trinity Gardens, Wood Green, was deserted. Save
where an open trench for pipes bisected it like a black knife-
gash, " all spotless lay the untrodden snow." In the Trinity
Road Higher Grade Board School, which fronted this blanket
of virginal purity, the Sixth, Seventh, and ex-Seventh Standards
were receiving their weekly spoonful of " English," after an
exhausting week of French, German, Chemistry, Botany, Electric-
ity and Magnetism, Physiography, Euclid, Algebra, Calisthenics
and the Tonic-Sol-Fa Method of Voice Production. The Eng-
lish tabloid for the week was " Hohenlinden," and the senior
assistant teacher, who cared more for white blood corpuscles and
protoplasmic continuity than belles-lettres, misunderstood the ob-
vious excitement among the boys massed beneath the big rostrum.
Preoccupied with the biological difficulties of the B.Sc. Final, he
selected Bert Gooderich to stand up and read the poem through.
Now Bert Gooderich was not a suitable person to stand up and
read a poem through. He was a brown-haired, black-eyed youth
of fourteen (nearly), built compactly, and solidly, like a sack
of concrete cement, with the mouth tied up. He was muscular,
with a promise of lengthening bone and deepening chest. His
voice had broken a month or so before. His round-barrelled
calves touched .as he stood with his feet together. Pulling the
London School Board text-book towards him he held a blue and

3

4 CASUALS OF THE SEA

white handkerchief to his face. He wiped his nose, slid the
half-dissolved sugared-almond dexterously from his mouth, re-
placed the handkerchief in his pocket, and sniffed.

" On — on Linden, Wen the sahn was laow*
Orl spotless lye the — untrodden snaow,
An* dawk an' wintry was — the — flaow
Of — 1-ser — raollin' rapidly."

I do not propose to spell everything Bert says with the above
phonetic accuracy. But that is how he talked.

He seemed a little startled by the peculiar scanning of the
last line. It seemed wrong somehow, left him with a chestful
of breath. He said that last line again, to make sure. He
looked out of the corner of his eye at the grinning comrades
about him and sniffed impassively. He felt under no obligation
to give the affair of Hohenlinden any further notice.

" Eeser, not Iser," said the teacher sharply. " I heard Mr.
Talbot tell you yesterday that i in German is pronounced ee."

Bert Gooderich looked at the word " Iser " again. There it
was — I-s-e-r. If that wasn't Eyser, he had no use for it. Pos-
sibly the German lesson had contained something like that, but
Bert had been preoccupied with a young Japanese rat in a con-
densed milk-tin which Flying Machine Brown had shown him
under the desk.

" Begin again, Gooderich," said the teacher, and Gooderich
began again. The teacher looked at the clock. All the boys
save Bert did the same. It was twenty-four minutes past four.
The teacher looked at his watch, and those boys who had watches
did the same, surreptitiously. Six minutes more, and then —

"On Linden, when the Sun was low,
All spotless lay the untrodden snow."

The teacher with sudden intuition realised exactly the ap-
propriate nature of the poem to the day, and smiled through
the window at the falling flakes. With the maddening servility
of schoolboys the class did likewise. Some even ventured to
giggle.

The senior assistant teacher frowned the smile and giggles
out of existence. He exerted his authority, and the gigglers
found themselves standing on the form, a wearisome penance.
It was now twenty-six minutes past four. Bert Gooderich had

CASUALS OF THE SEA 5

again tackled the last line with dubious enunciation and heaved
a sigh of relief. English literature was not his forte.

" Who wrote Hohenlinden, Brown ? " asked the teacher.

Brown, Flying Machine Brown, in his brother's old coat and
his father's Shakespear collar, Brown with his alert yet vacuous
features, did not know. The senior assistant teacher found it
increasingly difficult to find anything that Brown did know.
Sometimes, in the evenings, he would debate with the others who
shared his room, who would be top of the Sixth Standard. He
never debated who would be bottom. It was always Brown.

One or two hands were put up — self-conscious, apologetic
hands. The owners of the hands were obviously anxious to avoid
being considered erudite. The others thought you cocky if you
put up your hand too often.

" Thomas Campbell wrote Hohenlinden, Brown," said the
teacher sadly. And the hands dropped quickly. Bert Gooderich
sat down and resumed the sugared-almond.

" Yes, sir," said Brown brightly, willing to learn and anxious
not to be kept in.

** Yes, sir ! " mimicked the teacher. " And you'll forget it be-
fore you get home, eh? "

Brown hoped so, but smiled diplomatically.

"All right," said the teacher, "that'll do; Alder, collect the
books."

Alder, a Noel Park oil-and-colour-merchant's son, received the
books from the end boy of each form, all the others scraping
their feet and thrusting exercise books into home lesson bags.
Behind the huge green curtains which cut the room in two, you
could hear the junior standards clattering out by the back door.
A great hubbub arose throughout the school. Caps were snatched
from the hooks, mufflers tied on, satchels slung over the left
shoulder, and the Sixth, Seventh, and ex-Seventh Standards
swarmed out into the chapel yard. It should be noticed that the
Higher Grade School was part of the premises behind the
Wesleyan Chapel, whose buttresses formed small courts convenient
for marbles, chewy chase, and small-boy torture.

Eventually the whole school was trampling the whiteness of
the Trinity Road. Many boys had short sticks, others had
" blood-knots," pieces of clothes-line with a knot at one end. All
looked eagerly across the triangular common towards the citadel
of " the Michaels."

6 CASUALS OF THE SEA

The Michaels were the nearest enemies of the " Graders."
The Michaels were cut off from democratic and bourgeois sym-
pathy by their religion, which was church. They were choir-boys,
many of them ; others were worse — they were Roman Catholics.
Their school lay on the high road near the high church, between
the devils of the Graders and the surging sea of Boarders or
common Board School lads from Whitehart Lane.

By one of those subtle collusions which are the despair of
psychology the Boarders had made a truce with the Michaels,
with the obj ect of crushing the Graders once for all. Bert Good-
erich, purchasing comestibles for his mother at a shop on Jolly
Butchers Hill, had met, and fought for six minutes, with the
acknowledged leader of the hardy Whitehart Lane army. In
the small ring immediately formed, several Michaels had cheered
the Boarder. Bert, all his Grader blood boiling, and some of it
streaming from his nose, had snatched up his net bag of provisions,
and flinging a challenge to both schools to fight the Graders and
get licked, had darted away before the odds grew too serious.
This happened on the previous day. It took but a few hours for
every responsible warrior in all three academies to learn of the
fray and the gauge flung down by the Trinity Road hero, and the
coming of the snow warned the Graders that a battle of Homeric
dimensions would be fought before some of them had tea.
. Leaving the kids to skirmish and smother each other with
amateurish snowballs, Bert Gooderich and his lieutenants leaned
against the railings in front of the sacred edifice and discussed
the position. It was nothing to Bert that he himself could have
gone home to Bounds Green without harm. The lieutenants
lived Noel Park way, Hornsey way, some even dwelt in White-
hart Lane. Bert swung his blood-knot and matured his plans.
There was no supineness about Bert now, no sniffing lack of
interest. Bert was one of those lofty souls who do not read
poems about battles, but fight them with a bloody joyousness that
causes poets and suburban residents to appeal to the police. He
was a great asset to the Graders, whose ranks were weakened by
numerous middle-class boys, poor emasculated creatures who wore
white collars continually and who went away to the seaside in
August. Instinctively they leaned on Bert, whose father was
an engine-fitter at a big works in the City, and whose Augusts
were spent fishing in Littler's Pond, bird-nesting out at Enfield,

CASUALS OF THE SEA 7

or roaming through Hadley Wood. They leaned on him now,
as he swung his blood-knot and matured his plan.

" They're comin', Bert ! " called out a lieutenant, peering
through the snowflakes. Bert saw " them " plainly enough. He
thrust his knot and his hands into his pockets, hunched his
shoulders and started to cross the common. The whole school
moved forward, like an army, or a flock of sheep. (The reader
can take his choice of metaphors.) When he arrived at the pipe-
trench, Bert paused and spat. It was half choked with snow,
its jagged edges and yawning depth were alike concealed and
softly rounded in spotless purity.

Bert spat into the trench. The lieutenants looked at the red-
dish circle of his saliva with respect. They all knew Bert spat
blood. It was one of those mystical attributes of greatness among
boys. Many of them longed to spit blood like Bert. One boy
who had had a tooth out in the dinner-hour, spat crimson and
gained high prestige for a while, but such a means of attaining
it was considered cheap, like cough mixture, which only made
a brown stain. Bert's bronchial apparatus was adrift somewhere,
as was proved when he retched phlegm for the edification of a
new boy. It was his crowning distinction, his deathless claim to
sovereignty over them. He spat blood.

" 'Ere," he said to Winship, a lieutenant who wore trousers
and who lived (slept, anyhow) in Whitehart Lane. " 'Ere, Art,
you go 'ome, that's what you'd better do. Up past the Alms-
'ouses."

"W'y?" demanded Winship with suspicion. "See any
green? "

" Go on," said Bert, stooping majestically and forming the
first real snowball of the fight with deftly-pressing fingers.
" 'Ow do we know the Boarders ain't comin' down Trinity Road,
jus' for a change like ? I'm goin' acrost to mop up these Michaels.
So 'urry, Arty, my love."

Arty, Bert's love, threw up his head in enlightenment and
strode off up the bank of the dyke towards the Trinity Road.

"What's up, Bert?" asked a lieutenant in glasses.

" Come on," said Bert, striding the Rubicon and making for
the Michaels. "We got ter keep this side o* the 'ole — see? —
till I tell yer."

The Trinity Graders, happily delivered of a number of the

8 CASUALS OF THE SEA

aforesaid middle-class decadents who had " gone home " to their
tea and home lessons, and who would be virtuously and insuffer-
ably learned on the morrow, now advanced, a cluster of black
dots, across the white counterpane of snow. Over against the
red brick St. Michael's school-house, the patrons of that saint
were to be seen plainly, craven hearts whom fear of Bert kept
from taking a glorious initiative. When Bert had spat into the
trench, they had retired from the east to the west side of their
road. Now they were inside their yard, round suspicious heads
showing over the wall and a covey of excited, oily-haired little
choir-boys fluttering in the dim porch. The bigger lads were be-
ginning to think that they had done unwisely in retreating.
Choir practice was at half-past five, and Bert Gooderich cared
neither for God nor man, neither night nor day, snow nor fine.
Bert punched them furiously whenever he found them. Now they
were in the yard their allies seemed far away, choir practice was
near. Bert and his Nonconformist hordes were nearer still. He
might besiege them till eight o'clock. Old Plantagenet, the
organist, would be wild.

The lieutenants were all agog with delight. Already they
were spotting the Michaels' porch with erratic snowballs; one
downy little choir-boy had remained peeping through the bars of
the gate, when a hard and swift ball caught him in the teeth and
he ran screaming into the panic-stricken porch. But Bert was
not simply a boy out for a lark; he was a general playing a two-
to-one game, he was a tactician with a scheme to develop. Bert
looked back across the common to see if Winship had gone through
like a coward, or was beng chased like a rabbit back to the fight.
Snow no longer fell thickly ; you could see the lamps of the Free-
mason's Tavern twinkling away up Trinity Road. Somewhere
up there the Boarders were mustering. Bert never miscalculated
on the puny defence of the Michaels. He knew they had been
in communication with the Boarders. A snowball struck him on
the shoulder. He ignored it, staring away towards Trinity Road.
Where was the trousered Winship?

II

AT the northern apex of the triangular common, erected,
with superb indifference to man's needs, in the very
centre of the highway, was a granite obelisk, from
whose walls gushed drinking water except when the
Berts of this world had plugged the pores with slate pencils.
A sarcophagus with water inside it, and a Scripture text relating
to thirst outside it, stood near the obelisk. Two horsemen had
reined in near this point as Bert passed those anxious moments
waiting for news of Winship. Police Inspector Everett was
returned from his inspection of the Y Division. Colonel Corinth-
Squires, late 73rd Bengal Cavalry, now of H. M. Science and Art
Department, was returned from his afternoon ride. They had
met on the Bounds Green Road, had cantered towards home
through the snow, and now, like old campaigners, allowed their
beasts the smallest possible drink of water before going on to
oats and chopped hay. The Colonel, moreover, had offered his
silver brandy flask to the Inspector, only to be declined, for the
latter drank whisky.

" I knew how it would be, when we accepted the lowest tender
for those pipes ! " said the Colonel, looking across the common.
" That trench has been ready for laying over a week now. Scan-
dalous ! "

" I heard," said the Inspector, disentangling his spur from his
long blue coat — " I heard that Marsh and Lascelles propose to
make a park of this patch, with raised shrubberies and asphalt
paths and a bandstand."

Marsh and Lascelles will take jolly good care they don't pay
for the shrubberies and paths and bandstand ! " snapped the Col-
on. 1. " Now I would make it an athletic drill-ground for the
two schools, and what's more I'd set the ball rolling. See the
of the thing ! A school each side, with a drill shed, parade
ground, football field, and, later on, a swimming bath and gym-
nasium on this corner. Make it a decent building, with a clock.
These poor little beggars have to go by train to Hornsey Road,
dammit, to get a bath ! Scandalous ! "

0

10 CASUALS OF THE SEA

"The place is a battlefield all the time now," said the In-
spector. " My men are always taking names and addresses."

" Names and addresses ! Look here, my dear Everett, why on
earth can't the police leave 'em alone, so long as they do their
fighting on the common ? Hang it, it's in the air, this confounded
repression. They complain of poor recruiting, and I'm not sur-
prised. I'm not a damn bit surprised! Yes, we'll go along
Trinity Road. The school and the Sunday-school and the keep-
off-the-grass notices in the parks, and the police! How can a
youngster grow self-reliant and big in the chest if he's under lock
and key all the time? You mark my words, Everett, it's a mis-
taken policy. In the old days, there were wigs on the green.
And now, dammit, if a boy shies a stone he's up before me, and
I have to fine his parents ! "

" You should live in the country, Colonel. Wood Green is a
suburb : Y Division, you know ! "

" That's a nice thing to say to me, Everett ! My grandfather
had Chits Hill Place before Dick Ford organised you. I say,
Everett, just wait a minute, will you? Do you notice anything
about that mob of youngsters on the green ? "

The Inspector, with great good humour, reined his steed beside
the Colonel and looked abroad.

" I'm much mistaken, Everett, if there isn't a young general in
charge of these Higher Grade boys. Look now ! There's a squad
keeping back those lads of Whitehart Lane, there's another squad
taking the front of the attack on St. Michael's School, the main
body are retreating in good order, and by gad ! they're covering a
detachment of sappers in that pipe trench ! See the idea, Everett ?
I wish I had my glasses ! "

The Inspector said nothing, but smilingly watched the fight.
The two horsemen might have been officers directing the engage-
ment. The Colonel was excited.

" Look now, Everett ! The main body's retreated across the
trench. The St. Michael's boys are going to rush it. There's
always plenty of snow in a ditch. I remember that. They'll fall
into the ambush. It's magnificent! And look at the left wing.
They've swung round to support the squad in the Trinity Road.
Now look! They're in the trench, and by Jove, they've got it!
No, no! The sappers are at 'em. Well, I'm blessed! It's a
regularly-planned feint. See, the St. Michael's are on the run,
fairly on the run. Down, too, some of 'em. And look at the main

CASUALS OF THE SEA 11

body. They're after 'em like a shot. No need of a left wing
now. Sappers are always hot stuff in a tussle. The lad that's
bossing this fight is an embryo general. See how they're keeping
the Whitehart Lane chaps from coming out into the open. I wish
I had my glasses. It's as good as a play ! "

" I'm afraid the play's over, Colonel. It's nearly dark."

" Not a bit of it. These young rascals can see like cats. And
their leader won't stop now. He'll smash up the St. Michael's and
then wheel his whole force round and chase the Whitehart Lane
boys to Kingdom Come. I'm going round Commerce Road and
back to the Freemason's Tavern to see the rout."

Putting their animals to a trot the two grey moustached men
passed up the shop-lined Commerce Road and emerged upon the
High Road, where the trams now run towards Enfield. As they
came up to the Trinity Road once more, they beheld what the Col-
onel justly called the rout. Penned in between the private dwell-
ings and the high wall of the Almshouses, the Whitehart Lane boys
were struggling with a furious onset from the whole army of
Higher Graders. Sticks, stones, snowballs, weighted with flints,
blood-knots, and fists were flying in all directions. Hoarse cries
of derision and victory blent with the roar of the High Road. In
the forefront of the battle, with bloody face and empurpled eyes,
Bert Gooderich was hammering home the most famous victory of
his life. His blood-knot was gone, his clothes were torn and
wet, and his satchel was empty. But he was fighting like a
demon. Incessantly he stopped and moulded a snowball from the
blackened slush of the roadway, and with deadly aim he blinded
the nearest enemy. Now and again he closed with some desperate
Boarder, and struck again and again at the boy's chin until the
battle separated them.

It was an immemorial custom of the belligerents to regard the
publicity of the High Road as the Romans regarded the Danube.
The barbarians of Whitehart Lane might retreat across it. By
doing so they earned a respite of twenty-four hours and the mock-
ery of a week. On this particular evening, as the Inspector and
the Colonel turned away northward again, the Graders reached
the last lamp-post of Trinity Road, and a policeman moved slowly
across from the Freemason's Arms to quell the disturbance. Be-
fore he was halfway across the barbarian ranks were broken and
flying southward, and the Graders, flushed with triumph, retreated
with back-turned faces and occasional gibes at the copper. Now

12 CASUALS OF THE SEA

indeed the- battle was ended, overshadowed by darkness and
the anger of the law. Wearily Bert Gooderich climbed the plinth
of the granite obelisk and drank thirstily from the heavy copper
cup. He had lost his exercise book. There would be trouble with
old Piper in the morning.

And there was the long, lonely walk home.

Such are the vicissitudes of greatness !

Ill

THE Gooderich family, of whom a good deal will be writ-
ten in this book, lived in Maple Road, a thoroughfare
more easily imagined than described. The High Road
from Wood Green crossed the western end of it, giving
the drivers of pantechnicons and drapery-vans a view of a short,
broad, level avenue, with a church at one end of the north side, a
church in the middle of the south side, six large houses and eight
small villas. The eastern end of this road was shadowed by tall
oaks, and tailed off into a quiet lane that wound interminably to-
wards Tottenham. Thus it was that the Gooderich family, who
rented the last but one of the small villas, and who had no pre-
tensions to gentility, dwelt in a genteel thoroughfare, and their
roof, in the morning, was darkened by the shadow of the ancestral
oaks of Verulamium.

Both ecclesiastical buildings in Maple Road were dissenting, but
the Established Church, a dry, stand-offish edifice, frowned from
the other side of the High Road; the sexton lived at number eight
(a small house), and the curate, unmarried and genial, at number
four (a large house). Nothing ever broke the calm of this rural
neighbourhood, save the Italian barrel-organ at seven o'clock on
Saturday evening, and the fact that only six miles separated it
from the mightiest city in the world, seemed a wild and incredible
myth.

The Gooderich family lived, with lapses for meals, in the
back of the house, the front room being occupied by furniture.
On Sunday mornings, for instance, there was a further lapse.
Mrs. Gooderich would stand a little to one side of the front win-
dow, one finger cautiously holding the edge of the curtain, and
watch, as in a glass darkly, the Baptists going to chapel. This
curiosity of Mrs. Gooderich was perfectly innocent. She was
thirty-four years of age and she had a great desire to look at other
women's clothes. But the mention of church-going and clothes
recalls the fact that the internal economy of the Gooderich family
will be badly comprehended without an account of the early career

13

14 CASUALS OF THE SEA

of Mrs. Gooderich. She was born in Berkshire, and her father
was a farm labourer. Her five sisters, one by one, went out to
service, and it would have been little less than a miracle if Mary
had escaped the same fate. The miracle did not happen — no
miracle had happened in Wantage since the Reformation — and
Mary Higgs, with her small figure, small features, small blue eyes,
and small wooden box, was put into the London train to go and
make her fortune.

Mary's first, and last, mistress was a stockbroker's wife at
Hornsey. There were no children, not many visitors, and not
much to do, for the stockbroker was only a junior partner at
the time, and he was obsessed by a vision of that famous land-
scape, " A Rainy Day." So Mary dressed herself in a black dress
and white cap and apron every day at three o'clock and chat-
tered with the servant next door through the trellis work that
separated the gardens. The servant next door was a flaming
blonde with four young men, and she liked Mary from the first.
The flaming blonde was a Hoxton girl, and considered it her duty
bound to start Mary in social life. The first Sunday out saw
them in Finsbury Park. To a girl who had lived in Wantage all
her life, Finsbury Park, with its vast lake, colossal refreshment
pavilion, broad avenues of stately trees, and its hum of Life,
was the Elysian Fields. Mary was introduced to a deep-chested
young man who took her for a row on the lake. Boating in Fins-
bury Park is not the naval scrimmage one finds in Battersea Park.
You rowed round and round until your sixpenny worth was up;
you kept clear of other crafts and then stepped ashore to eat ices
and meringues at little tables. You made due allowance for the
fact that personal remarks travel a long way over water, and spoke
low. It was like Maple Avenue, genteel. Mary enj oyed it for a
month or two, and then the flaming blonde, who wore an engage-
ment ring on these Sundays out, went to Finsbury Park alone,
and the deep-chested young man took his airing on the lake in
solitary state. Mary was indisposed, so her friend said, conceal-
ing the whole truth, which was that Mary was indisposed to pro-
ceed any further with the tedious business of a humdrum love-
making. Mary Higgs was not built that way. The young man
who delivered two Coburgs and a Hovis loaf daily at the stock-
broker's back entrance was infinitely more amusing. He told
Mary diverting stories, he gave her copies of the Illustrated Stand-
ard and the Mirror of Life, and he formed the habit of leaving

CASUALS OF THE SEA 15

bags of stale pastry, which Mary consumed in the small room over
the scullery where she slept. And on the Sunday when she was
indisposed, as I have stated above, she waited until the flaming
blonde had boarded the old horse-tram in the High Road, and
then hastened away northwards towards Jolly Butchers Hill.
The baker's cart, divested of its trade-boards, and looking exactly
like a neat gig, was waiting for her at the top of the hill, under
the trees in front of the Fishmongers' Almshouses. This was
much more to Mary's taste. They drove out past Winchmore
Hill and Enfield, and in the deep lanes that lead away to
Waltham and Broxbourne, the baker's young man made love in a
manner manifestly impossible on the Finsbury Park lake. And
then in the summer evening they drove across country to Potters
Bar and halted at a public-house on the North Road. Here
Mary had a glass of stout brought out to her as she sat in the
trap, and her swain lighted another cigar.

This was a beginning of a new existence for Mary Higgs.
I don't think she was very much in love with the man. He
had a very taking manner with women, and seemed to be able
to take liberties that they would have resented in another. He
earned good money as a journeyman, being particularly clever
at " smalls," and if she considered the matter at all, I suppose
Mary would have decided that she was doing very well for herself.
He was fascinated by Mary's petite figure, her dark hair and blue
eyes, and the faint Berkshire accent of her speech. They were
both slightly romantic. The fascination lasted for three months,
and then the stockbroker's wife changed her baker.

For the first few days Mary bore the absence of her lover
in patience. Of course he could not come every day now that he
had no reason for calling. One evening, while buying groceries,
she walked past the shop where he worked, but the proprietor's
wife was serving another servant with pastry and Mary did not
care to go in. Sunday came and went, the flaming blonde
went forth to walk out with her young man, and Mary was
alone. She was quite at a loss until she formed the desire to
find him. She scorned the idea of waiting about until he came
by. That was not yet. She had no pangs because she had given
way to him. She was merely at a loss.

The week was long and tedious. On the Friday evening she
had to run out hastily to get some sponge cakes for a late tea.
The stockbroker's nephew and nieces had come for a visit from

16 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Twickenham. Mary went to the old shop and bought the cakes
from a boy in an apron, a smart well-brushed boy.

"How's Mister Royce?" she asked in the course of a light
conversation.

"Him? Oh, Vs gone."

" Oh." Mary took the change — you get fourteen sponge cakes
for one and a penny — and counted the five pennies. " Where's
he gone to ? "

" Gone to the Col'nies. 'Is brother's out there, yer see."

" Really ! You do surprise me."

He did. It was not the first time Mr. Royce's movements had
provided a young woman with a surprise. Mary went swiftly
home and thought the matter out while she made cocoa and lemon-
ade for the nephews and nieces. She did not care, only — well,
she didn't care so long as nothing happened.

You can remain a long time in such a state of mind. You
can get used to it, even. You can do your work, and read the
newspaper, and talk to a flaming blonde about her approaching
nuptials in a perfectly sane way.

And when the Saturday dinner is over and done with, and you
run upstairs to put yourself straight, you can even look into the
glass at a flushed damp face and heaving bosom, and argue that
the flush is due to the hot kitchen fire and the short breath to the
hasty climb, not at all to the thoughts of the empty to-morrow.
But it makes a change for all that. You will see a crease in the
corners near your eyes, and your mouth is a little harder.

Mary did not wait for the breaking point, however. After
a fortnight of close-lipped suspense, she paid another visit to the
smart well-brushed boy, and asked to see his mistress. The
baker's wife, wide of features and slow of movement, emerged
from the sitting-room at the back.

" Mr. Royce," said Mary, " 'e used to be a friend o' mine.
Could you tell me where a letter '11 find 'im ? "

The baker's wife looked at the small figure of Mary as she
ran her fingers to and fro on the curved glass of a Fry's choco-
late showcase.

" Come in 'ere, my dear ! " she said, moving towards the back
room, and Mary followed her.

Women have great courage. Half an hour afterwards Mary

CASUALS OF THE SEA 17

came out smiling, a piece of paper in the palm of her glove. She
shook hands with the baker's wife, who was remarking:

" As I say, I doubt if it's any use, but there it is." And
Mary smiled and thanked her. She opened the shop door and
the resonant " ting " made her jump.

" Let me know, won't you ? " said the baker's wife, and again
the girl smiled and thanked her. '

The next day was Sunday, a hot September day, and Mary
lay down for a while before she dressed. Her hands and lips
were dry, and twice she interrupted her toilet to wash and to
rinse her mouth.

A street off the Caledonian Road was the object of her search.
To the dwellers in outer North London, the geography of inner
North London is as perplexing as that of Jersey City or Genoa.
One passes high over it all in the train: it consists principally,
as far as one can see, of backyards and sky signs. Mary took the
Seven Sisters Road tram to the Nag's Head. " You can walk
from there," the baker's wife had said. So you can, on a cool
day, and if you know the way. But it was a blazing day. The
bicycles lifted the white dust of the road into the quivering air,
and the sunlight reflected from the sidewalk made her eyes ache.

A policeman helped her. " Third, fourth, fifth on the left ! "
he told her, and she went on again. When she reached the road,
Caroline Road, the number she wanted was a long way down.
No. 261 Caroline Road, N. It was what they call a nice little
'ouse. In North London, if you own a row of such, you will re-
ceive more local homage, reverence, and fame, than an author, a
cricketer, and a trick cyclist put together. Literature? Sport?
They pass, evanescent; the houses stand. You have a stake in
the country. You do not talk or act, you are. After you leave
the saloon bar, men who know you by sight claim the friendship
of your inmost soul. '* Don't ask me 'ow many 'ouses 'e's got ! "
they say, in humorous condescension, to foreigners.

No. 261 was owned by such a person. In fact, Mr. Royce
Senior was the person and he lived at 261. Consequently,
when Mary Higgs was ushered into his presence, he left his visitor
to make the first move. He was sitting in the front room, a box
of cigars and a bottle of whisky on the table at his side. When
Mary said she was a friend of his son, he let it pass. When
she went on to say that she understood his son had gone to the

18 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Colonies, he looked hard at her but let that pass too. But when
she cornered him by asking for his son's address, he spoke.

" Anythin' important?" he said, blowing out smoke.

" I'm three months gone," she answered with rustic brevity,
" and I'd like to know when he's comin' back."

The owner of twelve nice little 'ouses looked at Mary Higgs in
shocked surprise. He had been against the idea of his youngest
son going out to the Colonies. His idea had been to buy him a
nice little business near by and set him up. His youngest son
was inclined to fall in with this, had in fact delayed his departure
to discuss the matter. Mr. Royce Senior was rather sorry now
that the young man had not gone after all. Not that he had any
objection to his son marrying a girl in service, for Mrs. Royce
Senior had been a housemaid. But Mr. Royce Senior did not be-
lieve Mary's story at all. He had lived in London for a great
many years and he had a large experience of the villainy of hu-
man nature. It was one of his axioms that while men are liars,
young women in trouble are greater liars still, that they will
stick at nothing to fasten a claim upon some quite possibly inno-
cent young man. He did not preach on this text save very
rarely, in private, to his sons, but avoided such difficult themes,
just as he avoided auctions and deaths in his nice little 'ouses.
Moreover, Mr. Royce Senior had no opinion of a young woman
who was fool enough to let a man have his own way. It stamped
her as unfit to be a mistress of a nice little 'ouse. Mr. Royce
Senior's devotion to the solidarity of his class was very deep, very
sincere, very unconscious. He was as incapable of ratting as a
Tory Duke. His eminence as a houseowner and landlord did
not shake this loyalty to his humble class, it confirmed it. He
was an embodied respectability, as his wife, now some years de-
ceased, was a disembodied respectability, whose funeral (at
Abney Park) was as a second Anno Domini to many matrons in
Caroline Road. And here was this embodied respectability con-
fronted with a young woman who " tried a new game " by stating
unmentionable facts directly and without loss of time; thinking
to wring his withers by surprise, he imagined. Well, that was
an improbable event, because Mr. Royce Senior was a business
man, and he was just as much alive to the interests of his pocket
and position on Sunday afternoon as he was on Monday morning.'
So he turned the matter over in his mind, looking at Mary the
while.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 19

" I see 'ow it is," he said at length, looking severely at his
cigar. " What you'd better do is to let me move in the matter.
I'll write to 'im, see? 'E'll listen to me. I'll 'ave to 'ave 'is
side o' the thing, too, 'fore I can move in the matter. What's
your address ? "

He reached out a fat hand to a roll-top desk at his back and
took a piece of paper and a pencil.

" Mary Higgs, ' The Glen,' Eldersleigh Road, Hornsey, N.,"
said Mary, and repeated it in overlapping instalments until Mr.
Royce Senior had it all safely down. " Yes, H-I-G-G-S. Higgs.
Double G. The Glen — that's the name o' the 'ouse — El-ders-
leigh — L-E-I-G-H, Hornsey."

" Yes. All right, I'll attend to it. You see 'ow it is, I can't
move in the matter — oh, quite so, I'm not saying that at all.
Only nowadays, you know, must protect ourselves." He stood up
and laid his cigar down. Mary stood up too. She felt unable
to do anything else. Mr. Royce Senior followed her out into the
narrow passidge " and held open the front door. He did not
offer his hand, but he maintained the friendly prove-your-case-
and-I'm-with-you tone in his voice.

" Don't worry. Jus' leave it to me, see? " And he shut the
door.

" It's like this," he said sternly to his son about three hours
later. " It's like this. Don't you reckon I'm going ter buy off
young women for yer, because I ain't. I don't want ter know
whether 'er story's true or not, 'cause I don't care. You're
twenty- four an' your own master, not mine. If you want to go
to the Colonies, you can go and I'll start yer. If you want to
stop 'ere, stop, an' marry the girl, and don't look ter me."

This completes the Royce incident. The briskness of Mr.
Royce Junior, the masterly inactivity of Mr. Royce Senior, to-
gether with the successful prosecution of stockbroking by Mary's
employer, render it unnecessary to detail life as it is lived in
Caroline Road.

IV

I DO not know that Mary's mistress was a very unconven-
tional person. In fact, she was very like many young
women I have met in suburban society. She was not very
religious, nor yet very giddy. As her family grew up,
she formed the habit of going to church, because of the children;
she liked her husband's friends, and they liked her; she dressed
nicely, and knew a good deal about her husband's money mat-
ters, because she understood office work, having been in the City
for a couple of years as a shorthand clerk. Indeed, like the
young women above mentioned, she in no way resembled the
stock figures of suburban fiction. I am obliged to emphasise
this point, or the reader will imagine I am departing from the
truth when I record that she " waited up " on that hot Sunday
evening when her maid did not return as usual, at nine o'clock.
She was reading a book in the drawing-room when she looked
up and saw, through the bow-window, the figure of Mary Higgs
coming hurriedly up the path to the front door.

" Why, Mary! Wherever have you been? "

" Oh, ma'am, I am sorry — please excuse me this once. I —
I had a fit " ; and Mary dropped suddenly into the oak hall-chair
while her mistress turned up the light.

"A fit! What was the matter, the heat?"

" Yes, ma'am. I felt all giddy like, and — and I fell down."

" There, there ! Come into the dining-room."

Mary, helped a little, for she was still faint, sank into a deep
chair in the dining-room. Mary's mistress stood by the table and
looked at her in perplexity. She wanted to call her husband,
but hardly knew what to do.

" What is it, Mary ? You're strong enough as a rule. Tell me
all about it?"

And that is just what Mary did, with rustic brevity. There
was a brief silence when she finished.

" I'll pack to-night, ma'am, an' go in the mornin'," she said.

" There's no need to do that, Mary. Go to bed now. I'll tell
you when to pack."

That was all. Mary went to bed, much more light-hearted than

20

CASUALS OF THE SEA 21

her mistress, who bolted the front door, and went upstairs to her
husband, who was smoking in the dressing-room.

" Has that baggage come home at last, Trix ? " he growled,
yawning. " What's up ? You've been a deuce of a time ! "

" Let's go to bed, dear. I'll tell you afterwards."

It is so much easier to tell intimate things in the dark.

It is here that I must strain the reader's indulgence. That
order to pack never came to Mary. The silent darkness, the faint
ticking of the clock, the cradled Miracle by the side of the big
brass bedstead, the success that was hovering over the business in
Copthall Avenue, all these things tended to ease the telling of the
tale to the husband. What he thought of it no one ever really
knew. Perhaps he did not know himself. That miracle of his
own was so recent, so barely detached from fairyland, that at
least we may conclude that he did not take Mr. Royce Senior's
view of the case. And yet he adopted that houseowner's masterly
inactivity, leaving the matter to his wife, and going off to get the
nine-fifteen next morning without a single reference to Mary.

That young woman communicated, in a disjointed fashion, the
details of her collapse on the blistered sidewalk of the Caledonian
Road, the sudden giving way of her limbs, the hot dust impreg-
nated with the smell of manure, the coming-to in the arms of a
perspiring stranger, the administration of brandy from a near-by
hostelry, the rest in a chemist's back room, the policeman all
blue and silver, the curious small crowd. In Mary's mind, the
ammonia-reek and the flashing buttons on the vast background of
the constable's tunic, were the salient recurring features. Over
and over again, as she lay on her bed, she felt the choking sensa-
tion in her lungs and saw those buttons like corrugated moons in a
blue universe confronting her aching eyes. It was missis' orders
that she was to lie still. A charwoman was making the best of it
in the kitchen. Nor to worry, either, said missis. Later a doc-
tor, if needful. Mary's eyes closed gradually.

Towards evening she tottered downstairs and entered the
drawing-room. Her mistress was sewing, rocking a cradle with
her feet.

" Please, ma'am, what'll you be doin' wi' me? I can't stay
here. I can't indeed, after this."

" Yes, you can, Mary. I told you before that i would help
you. What did you think of doing? "

" Goin' 'ome to Wantage, ma'am."

22 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" And be a burden to your mother ? That's foolish. You'll be
all right to-morrow again."

Mary was standing looking down at the cradle. The child's
face and small arms were uncovered, the hazel eyes were gazing
up at her, smiling, smiling. It seemed to the sad, soiled servant-
girl that the infinite mercy of high heaven was shining in those
clear, flawless little eyes. And she dropped on her knees and
bent her head over them in a wild abandon of unutterable
emotion.

And so Mary stayed on for another five months. The Spring
was in the blue sky, and the tall lilac bush blazed when her
mistress said one day:

" Get ready to go home, Mary. There's a train at Padding-
ton at ten-thirty to-morrow."

It had all been explained before, and Mary understood that
she was to go to her mother's for her lying-in. Mrs. Higgs
had paid a short visit to " The Glen " and received certain in-
structions. These things are regarded in a very human light by
country folk. A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the
country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted
cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows. Mary
was the youngest child, and Mrs. Higgs took children as you take
your breakfast, as a matter of course. There are quite a number
of folk who look at it this way.

I think Mary worshipped her mistress when, seeing the girl's
dark blue eyes strained towards the slumbering miracle, she
nodded assent. Just one light touch of the lips on the child's
forehead, and Mary went out, pale, downcast, and silent, and
drove away in a rusty four-wheeler, a diminutive blob of blue
cloak, black hat and veil in the corner of the vehicle, surmounted
by a brown corded box. And then there was the journey by
rail, and a silent old mother on the platform, concealing her emo-
tion under a fictitious care of the corded box. And the walk, the
progress up the long tiled path to the cottage set back from the
road, into the old home. They had carried the corded box be-
tween them from the station, and that was the last thing Mary
did for herself for some time.

IT was the easiest thing in the world for a subdued and con-
siderably changed Mary to stay on helping her mother and
tending the baby, instead of standing outside the Old Home
in the snow (true, it was summer-time) and peering through
the blinds at a tragic couple bathed in firelight and melodramatic
grief, which you may find, from theatre posters, is the correct
thing for girls in trouble. Her baby showed no signs of violent
evil as yet, no scarlet letter blazed on Mary's bosom, and the
Church embodied in an Oxford man who feared God much more
than he feared hard work, sent old magazines to read and left
things for Time to put right. Very gratefully Mary wrote a
scrawly ungrammatical letter to the stockbroker's wife, telling her
she was well and going on nicely, that the baby was a love, and
that she would be very glad and thankful to come back again,
if she might, when she could leave the baby. And God bless her
for her many kindnesses and no more at present.

It was in July, I think, that Fate, having been occupied with
an earthquake in Siam, an insurrection in Lima, and a war in the
Balkans, turned his attention once more to Mary Higgs. Mrs.
Higgs had a friend living near by whose eldest son, as we have
seen, was a fitter in a London shop.

This son, having had his right arm broken and having acquired
numerous contusions about the head, had been laid up for some
time. More for lack of the opportunity, perhaps, than anything
else, the invalided mechanic had never married. A self-con-
tained, reliable sort of man, stiff of beard, incalculable of eye, he
would stand at the green gate three gardens away, and smoke.
Grotesque too, the pipe emerging from the bandages that covered
the contusions, while the left hand, white and nerveless, with the
black dirt under the finger-nails showing like paint against the
blanched flesh, peeped from the end of the square wooden box
that enclosed his arm. The inevitable black scarf, changed to
white on Sundays, supported this arrangement in a horizontal
position. Mary watched him every day for a week when she

23

24 CASUALS OF THE SEA

picked lettuce in the long, narrow garden, or nursed her baby in
the porch. And then, on the day she wrote the letter to her
mistress, she passed him to reach the pillar-box that was built
into the brickwork of the last cottage in the row.

" Mornin', Mary Higgs," he said, nodding.

Mary stopped, startled, looked to see if he were serious in
his geniality, and then replied, quietly:

" Good mornin', Mister 'Erbert." Then she went on, dropping
her letter into the box, and returned.

" 'Ope your arm's better, Mister 'Erbert."

" Oh, slow an' sure, slow an' sure, Mary. 'Ow's yourself? "

" Nicely thanks ; mustn't grumble."

That was the gist of it for some weeks. Mister Herbert de-
veloped a latent genius for tact. This is easier in the country,
where words mean something, and everybody knows what you
mean. For instance, on Sunday morning:

" You ought to go, just t' show you're not unthankful! "

The church bell clanked in the distance, and Mary's face
lighted up.

"Oh, I'm not that, Mister 'Erbert! 'E's been that kind you
couldn't believe."

" That's 'im. Never seems to see nothink. Same wi' me.
Knows I 'ate to 'ave people jaw about me arm. 'E's what I call
a Christian."

" So do I."

" Don't matter what it is, a broken arm or — or a broken 'art,
eh? All the same to 'im. Good steel all through. No Yankee
malleable in him." Mary nodded, and he went on, " That's why
I say — you ought to go. I been twice."

" I will then," said Mary.

German science has doubtless full and sufficient theories to
account for the novel ideas in Mr. Herbert Gooderich's head.
Perhaps his tactful and philosophical nerve centres lay in his
right brain, and the enforced use of his left hand and arm de-
veloped them. Perhaps that is why so many right-handed folk
are difficult to get on with while they have their health. Perhaps
it is only nonsense, and the real reason was that a rather lonely,
idle, middle-aged invalid found something attractive, something
ineffably romantic, in Mary's plight.

Mary, too, was in an unusual mood since her first word with
Mr. Gooderich. She had begun to realise the worldly side of her

CASUALS OF THE SEA 25

position. Very gradually it formed itself in her mind. Towards
the baker's young man in the Colonies she felt nothing save a
vague dislike. She was quite useless, from the weekly news-
paper's " betrayed-girl's-desperate-act " point of view. A certain
refinement of soul made her feel that if she was unfit to be any
man's wife, he was unfit to be any girl's husband, especially hers.
His dominion over her vanished with himself. He was too brisk,
he had too much surface and too little depth to hold her as long
as that refinement streaked her nature. So she waited, wonder-
ing, watching the girl-baby.

Congratulations upon the abandonment of the square box from
his arm marked a period in their acquaintance. The black silk
scarf was still in use, but, with care, the arm was got into the
coat-sleeve — when he wore a coat. It was much pleasanter in
shirt-sleeves, reading the rapturous and scholarly racing critiques
in the Morning Leader, and smoking a colouring clay.

" Back to the bench soon," he assured her.

" You'll be glad to, I expect," she answered.

"Well, p'raps so, p'raps so. 'Ow's the young woman ? "

To such a stage had they attained when Mary received an-
other letter from her mistress. The stockbroker had done well,
solidly well, for two years, and when people in North London do
well, they move a little further North. You go up, you see, and
moving is a small matter. To pantechnicon yourself across to
Putney or Croydon is like going to Samoa or Venezuela, and the
cost is terrifying. So the stockbroker's new address was North
Finchley, where dear gas was set off by low rates. And Mary
was asked if she wished to come back. There would be a cook as
well, now, she learned. She was to let them know soon.

" I 'spect I'll be off out of this, too, soon," she said meditatively,
and Mr. Gooderfch leaned interestedly over his gate.

M That so? Old shop? " he asked.

" If I like. Dunno whether to — or not," she mused, moving a
pebble with the toe of her boot.

" Leave the young woman 'ere, I s'pose ? "

" Oh, 'course I'd 'ave to do that. 'What I don't like about the
business."

" Awkward, certingly. I been wonderin' you never thought
of gettin' married."

Mary Higgs deserted the pebble and looked Mr. Gooderich in
the eye.

26 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" It's not my place to think of anythin' o' the sort, Mister
'Erbert, and you know it."

" 'Ow's that? I'm speakin' for meself, o' course. What's to
hinder?"

" I'll thank you not to mention it, if you don't mind." And
Mary walked away towards her parents' house. But Mr. Good-
erich opened the gate with his left hand and came after her
through the dusk.

" Jus' listen to what I've got to say, and then we'll know
where we are, Mary. Here's me, sick o' lodgin's and wantin' a
place o' me own, an' here's you, as you are. I don't see nothing
unreasonable 'bout it. I'm old enough to know what's good for
me, eh? Or p'raps that's it, too old. If it is, say so; I'll think
none the worse of you."

As Mary stood by her gate, swinging it to and fro and listen-
ing to Mr. Gooderich's remarks, a faint wail smote her ears.

"There's baby!" she said, turning to him, but Mr. Goode-
rich's left hand held her arm.

" There's baby, as you say. I ain't forgettin' 'er, my girl, I
ain't forgettin' 'er. Understand ? "

The faint wail rose and fell, clucked and died, rose again.

Mary stood, listening to the sound, looking at the serious,
bearded, shirt-sleeved man who still held her arm. Then he let
her go without a word, his newly-found genius for tact reaching
its consummation in the act.

VI

SUCH were the pre-marital days of the small, rather untidy
woman getting tea in the kitchen sitting-room of No. 12
Maple Avenue, as Bert Gooderich returned from the great
fight. The kitchen was the most important room in the
house. You went round by the back way — that is, you did not
enter by Maple Avenue at all, but you rounded the acute angled
garden of No. 14 at the bottom of the road, ascended its other
side and, lifting the latch in a door further up, entered the bottom
of your own back garden. And Bert following this route, his
shoulders hunched, his coat collar turned up, and his hands deep
in his pockets, scuffled through the deep snow of the garden,
kicked his boots against the iron dust-bin and then entered the
kitchen, letting in, moreover, a gust of wind and snow.

" Oh, so you are back then, my lad," said his mother.

" Can't yer see me? "

" Been kept in, I s'pose? "

Bert responded with an incoherent growl about a bit of a lark
and subsided into a slow picking of boot-lace knots by the fire.
On the other side of the fire-place sat his elder sister Minnie,
with his younger brother Hannibal. Minnie was a quiet girl of
fourteen now, still without any evil bent, as far as her mother
could see, but the manner in which she regarded her elder brother
was peculiar. It was not malevolent, nor was it amiable. As
her mother said once, Minnie " sized you up." She seemed to
be forever sizing-up. It was a cool, balanced, calculating gaze.
It made Bert furious at times. As far as it lay with children to
do so, they detested each other. Minnie seemed to be saying,
" And what may your superiority consist of? " She had it then
even as she had it, more consciously and challengingly of course, in
later years. I remember it as the most penetrating thing in
the world, that look, when I think of her, her baby brother rest-
ing between her knees as she sat in a low, old cane chair close
to the coal cupboard, her forefinger chafing at the corner of that
huge Grimm's Fairy Tales, and her eyes beneath the level brows
bent towards the two clumpish boots on the steel fender, where

27

28 CASUALS OF THE SEA

the balled snow was melting from the heels all over the bright
metal. To be quite frank, that demeanour of Minnie's was a
source of occasional discomfort to her mother. She was too
quiet, Mrs. Gooderich thought. There was no " mother dear "
about Minnie. Later on she adopted the phrase, but even then
only in a sort of bantering sarcastic way, as when Mrs. Gooderich
at Barnet Fair, hearing another girl urge Minnie to come and
dance, said, " I didn't know you could dance, Miss," and Minnie,
moving away witli her friend, twittered, " Lots o' things you don't
know, mother dear ! " over her shoulder, leaving that Hannibal-
hampered woman with an uneasy mind.

House work, too, was another trial between Minnie and her
mother. Clever enough, even as a child, nothing perplexed her
level brows, but the will was lacking. Beds cannot be half made.
One must not deal flippantly with beds, nor should the slow ab-
sorption of At the Mercy of Tiberius, interfere with the turning-
out of rooms. The American woman who lived next door but one
listened with patience to Mrs. Gooderich on this point. " If she
was my child, I'd turn her over my knee and give her a good
spanking," she replied incisively, but even the un-English vul-
garity of the suggestion failed to conceal from the artisan's wife
the wild impracticableness of it. You might as well talk of
spanking the Empress of Russia, as Minnie Gooderich. She
was like that, if you understand me ?

At the Higher Grade Girls' School, where Minnie acquired
the complicated erudition supplied by the London School Board
and the Science and Art Department, there was never any trouble.
She slid from standard to standard without noise or clamour,
writing unexceptional essays in a beautiful variation of the verti-
cal angular caligraphy prescribed for her by those authorities,
making exquisite little coloured drawings of chemical experiments,
doing simple equations in a manner quite void of offence. Miss
Shelly, her teacher, had moments of rare exultation when she
thought of Minnie Gooderich, mistaking that young person for
one of her own simple equations, for Miss Shelly was dominated
by the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and had a glorious
belief in human nature. Indeed, you cannot censure Miss Shelly,
if you can picture to yourself the self-possessed Minnie at her
desk, with the embryonic Hannibal at her side, her hair in one
thick dark brown plait with an Oxford blue bow, the cream-col-
oured brows bent to her tasks, her blotless immaculate tasks.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 29

She never impressed you that she was " not like other girls."
She had nothing in common with Elinor Challis, the chemist's
daughter, who fainted in July, won a scholarship in September,
and died of cardiac syncope in the following April. Nor did she
remind you of Muriel Paston, whose father sold linoleum, cur-
tains, and bankrupt stock in the High Road (old Paston, who
would go to prison rather than vaccinate his children). But
Minnie's mother, at the time of which I am now writing, had come
to the conclusion that she was, all the same, very unlike other
girls. She had in her something imponderable and elusive, her
quiet orderly advance through suburban childhood had in it some-
thing inexorably logical about it. Her devotion to little Hanni-
bal was not devotion at all. Little Hannibal remained, in her
charge, in a sort of soporific catalepsy, he was " a remarkably
quiet child " with Minnie. To the gradually opening receptivity
of little Hannibal, the figure of his sister was woven into the
wood-cut kaleidoscope of Grimm's illustrations. She was a sort
of fairy stepmother, who froze his soul with a look and taught
him to say strange things. He had two other fairy stepmothers,
Minnie's two friends, strong-limbed, freckled, plumpish hoydens,
who screamed with laughter when little Hanny repeated those
strange things.

Bert Gooderich did not regard her as a fairy at all. He
knew, as he tugged off' his sodden boots, that Minnie's homework
was " done," done with that exasperating efficiency that you can-
not struggle against. He knew also that his own would never be
done. The smudged and crinkled copybook in which the work
was set out, was lying quite probably in the slush of the trench
on Trinity Green. The inevitable row with old Piper assumed
appalling dimensions in his mind. He had always heretofore
presented some sort of unintelligible riot of ink and paper in lieu
of correct answers. No work at all necessitated explanations,
and explanations invariably preceded hard caning and incarcera-
tion. Old Piper's heart was tender and he loathed corporal
punishment; but Bert's sullenly protesting taciturnity (the cor-
relative of Minnie's self-possession) roused the primordial devil
in old Piper, and he laid on, short sharp blows raining down pas-
sionately upon the hunched burly shoulders. . . .

And then old Piper, sweating a little about the temples, would
try to resume the nineteenth century and the lesson.

Such households as the Gooderichs drag along in a mysterious

30 CASUALS OF THE SEA

fashion. It is useless to calculate two pounds a week as a hun-
dred a year. When you pay your rent in shillings per week,
when you get your coal at one and threepence a hundredweight,
and you buy your provisions on Saturday night, you must adopt
a quite different arithmetic. You must pay expensively for every-
thing. Week after week the furniture people, the sewing-ma-
chine people, the wringer people, the insurance people, the piano
people, each take a little nibble from the thirty shillings left after
the rent is paid.

You buy " young Herbert " iron-shod boots to make them wear,
and the oilcloth and stair-carpet are worn out before you have
paid for them. You live on in North London because the rents
are low and it is expensive to move, and you pay double for gas.
You change back to oil lamps and start another little so-much-a-
week to the hardware stores. You try to make a little by keeping
a few chickens and the neighbours complain to the landlord, who
gives you notice. You let the front bedroom to a commission-
agent, who disappears with three months' rent in arrears. And
all the time it is work, work, work. You get into the way of
nagging, too.

It must not be supposed that Mrs. Gooderich was insensible
of her good fortune. Quite unconscious of any irony, she was
grateful that she should be permitted to slave in the ranks of re-
spectable women instead of living a life of joyous venture among
the unclassed. " What would have become of Minnie ? " she
would think, not deeming it worth while to ask further, " What's
becoming of Minnie anyway?"

For Mrs. Gooderich, like many driven mothers, imagined that,
barring that incalculable element that made her child strange,
she knew all about her. She ignored the long evenings when
Minnie was out with her friends, she forgot the unchaperoned
afternoons in Hadley Woods. The news that Minnie could
dance is a sample of the awakening.

And Miss Shelly was at a loss, and had an awakening. It
was one day in the dinner-hour, when many girls would bring a
packet of sandwiches and a cake in their satchel and eat it
near the stove. In those days you had to come long distances
to school in Wood Green, for the outer ramparts of London
Education were then precariously upheld by small and desultory
" academies " with fees and French, principals who took select
boarders, and assistants who took their departure without settling

CASUALS OF THE SEA 31

their laundry bills. And Miss Shelly, who had lodgings at
Stoke Newington, lunched at a confectioner's in the High Road
and afterwards sat by the stove reading. She was a fluffy-haired
little person, very neat about the wrists and ankles, and a relent-
less self-educator. And she sat there, her neat shoes up on the
stove-rail, reading Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the
Rights of Women, while Minnie and her two friends sat near by
on one of the forms, giggling over the open eyes and mouth of
little Hannibal. At least the other girls giggled. Minnie, ever
alert as to Miss Shelly 's proximity, bent over the child and whis-
pered, then the two girls would bend nearer and Hannibal would
be obliterated by three heads of hair. And then a throttled
squeal, a giggle, a scuffle of feet, perhaps a choke, with use of a
handkerchief, and Miss Shelly would look at the stove intro-
spectively for a moment. What were those girls romping about?
But it was little Hannibal himself who created drama out of
their idle giggling.

" Go," remarked little Hannibal with agonising distinctness —
" Go to — 'Ell! " and Miss Shelly leapt to her feet as though she
had been shot. One of the girls gave a convulsive whoop, choked,
and there was a frightful silence.

" Minnie Gooderich," said Miss Shelly, icily, sitting down.
" Come here to me."

It would have given Bert considerable satisfaction to have
seen his sister for the next twenty minutes, for if ever Minnie
felt uncomfortable, it was then. She really respected Miss Shelly,
and the knowledge that Miss Shelly no longer believed in her was
humiliating.

No brazening could stand against the young teacher's rigid
indignation, her awful horror of a girl who could deliberately
teach her little brother to swear. (To argue that little Hannibal
would swear anyway, in a few years' time, would have been
futile.) It was the sudden realising of the miry depths in
Minnie Gooderich, hitherto unsuspected, that appalled Miss
Shelly. She was very pale and preoccupied during afternoon
school, and sat for some time before a letter beginning:

Dear Mrs. Gooderich,

It is my painful duty to inform you . . .

But she got no further. She knew enough of children to

82 CASUALS OF THE SEA

realise that Minnie would care but little for her mother's remarks.
And eventually she tore the letter up. But the Good, the Beauti-
ful, and the True had received a shattering blow. If only Min-
nie had seemed to care at all! She had been merely apologetic,
the cool cream of her rather sallow face had coloured slightly,
and her chin had gone out and up instead of sinking on her breast
when she said she was " very sorry."

As spring advanced the Science and Art Department advanced
too, and prostrated the unfortunate teachers in London Board
Schools with a Botany Syllabus. Where possible, Seventh Stand-
ard girls were to attend on certain afternoons at the Boys' School,
for Elementary Botany. Bert Gooderich received the informa-
tion impassively because he had never heard of the thing before,
but he did sit up in a species of astonished bashfulness when he
beheld about a dozen big girls, with Minnie among them, file into
the room one afternoon in April and take their seats, with much
arranging of skirts and adjustment of elbows, on some vacant
forms. And little Hannibal was with them, the most astonished
of them all.

" The 'ole bloomin' fam'ly ! " said Bert to his neighbour. " If
my mother comes . . . lummy ! "

VII

LITTLE Hannibal was growing, but I think this Botany
Class was one of the most vivid pictures of his early
childhood, the picture that detached itself most com-
pletely from the dull-grey haze of domestic memories. I
want you to imagine that rather diminutive child of seven, buried
away among those strong-limbed, hoydenish girls, peering out
sideways at the boys over the gangway, and staring at the old
man who made curious drawings on the blackboard with coloured
chalks. His impressions of the boys were shadowy. There were
so many of them, all in rows along the desks, each with a short-
hand notebook, taking notes of what the man said. He watched
Minnie's operations with interest for a time, when he discovered
the walls of the schoolroom. They were wonderful walls to
Hannibal. There were vast shining charts of fierce lions and
tigers, coiling serpents, and amorphous creatures with satirical
names like ornithorhynchus and armadillo. There was a full-
length figure of a dusky person with a spear, a turban on his head,
and (apparently) another turban round his waist. A mild-look-
ing steam-engine, in blue and yellow, occupied another chart, but
Hannibal hardly noticed it. He gazed with a peculiar delight
upon the Tonic-Sol-Fa chart. He could find endless satisfaction
in outline. Even his mother's stunted intelligence had observed
this trait in little Hanny. He loved the feel of a smooth square
card-board box, and the stark black letters of the vocal scale at-
tracted him in the same way. How fat and black they were!
And you could read them any way; up or down, to and fro, it
was all the same. The fettering sequence of C-A-T and D-O-G
became fatiguing, Hannibal found. And then he twisted his head
a little more and looked over the boys' heads, and saw the largest
and newest and shiniest chart of all.

It was a diagram, in all the splendour of Oriental colouring,
of the Ideal Plant. There was a wonderful grey root straying
symmetrically into the most permeable brown earth, with a
straight tapering stem soaring to a heaven of varnished roller

33

34 CASUALS OF THE SEA

at the top. Arranged in a rigid helical progression were branches
of broad green leaves, branches of narrow brown leaves, branches
of oddly-shaped leaves, until at the very top of the stem was a
most miraculous flower, with a complete green calyx, a complete
red corona and exemplary pistil and stamens of gorgeous yel-
low. It was an amazing production, that Ideal Plant. It made
you feel keenly what a botched, un-science-and-art-like job the
Creator had made of his Flora anyway, with nobody to show him
how. But it did not make Hannibal feel that way, because he
knew very little about either God or Botany. He revelled in the
clean hard outlines, the flawless symmetry, of that Ideal Plant,
and rejoiced very frankly in the black lettering. For each part
of this plant was stabbed to the heart with a black arrow, and
each arrow was labelled with the name of that particular part.

He listened at times to the old bearded man with the shiny
forehead. In later years Hannibal always associated shiny var-
nished surfaces with Botany. As the old man raised his arm
to draw on the board, his coat sleeve fell back and the light
glistened on his shiny cuff. And the desks where the girls sat
were of richly marked pitch-pine, heavily varnished. And Min-
nie's new text-book shone, glazed and tooled till the eyes ached
as they rested on it. Elementary Botany. What garlands and
chains of letters there were in this great room !

It was a rich and splendid spring day, and the amber-col-
oured blinds were drawn over the tall windows as the sun swung
round and looked in. And spring was busy in the schoolroom:
seeds fell into the soft rich soil of boy and girl hearts, and small
ideal plants were beginning to grow here and there, while the
old bearded man with the polished forehead talked, and drew
on the board.

Bert Gooderich sat next to Flying Machine Brown in the
back row, unutterably bored by this new onslaught of South Ken-
sington. At the back of his mind lay a vague hatred of that
invisible but relentless tormentor. In some cases the perpetual
disturbance of the curriculum was beneficial. It aroused the teach-
ers, maddened them to heroic efforts of brain-culture, drove some
of them into journalism and private schools, some of them to mar-
riage and emigration. Often, too, it awakened long dormant in-
telligences among the boys and girls. Lads who had droned
through Euclid and Scale-drawing blazed into activity when old
Piper began German; others astonished him by an undreamt-of

CASUALS OF THE SEA 35

cleverness at Electricity and Magnetism. It was curious to watch
the amazement dawning in the mind of a boy who had outstripped
the others in Shorthand, as he watched some stenographic failure
leaping into fame in model-drawing or chemistry. But Bert
Gooderich and Flying Machine Brown sat at the back of it all,
blank deterrent failures, drags on the wheel, without hope or am-
bition. Even old Piper, with his marvellous intuition of the
child-soul, flogged them and broke up the silly little bits of mech-
anism that poor Brown secreted in his desk. Brown would sit
silent for the rest of the day, and then slip off home and become
another being altogether. As long as he could see he would file
and tinker and drill, making some other purposeless ill-finished
contrivance, hampered by lack of tools and material and, most of
all, knowledge. And on Saturdays he and Bert would walk far
away to the Seven Sisters Road, where there was a model-engine
shop, and Brown would sigh as he stared at the beautiful little
engines, all gleaming brass and copper, for they were so ex-
pensive. And then he would get " an idea," " a patent " they
called it, and for a week he would dream and tinker, tinker and
dream, and old Piper would lay on with that thin angry cane of
his. But it was never any use. Nothing could convince Brown
that Botany and model drawing and German were more impor-
tant to a lad who was to become an oil-shop errand-boy than
tinkering and dreaming of flying machines and Jules Verne sub-
marines. And afterwards, when I saw him trudging patiently
along Mayes Road or Maple Avenue with a basket of soap and
candles, and a can of paraffin, his blue apron smeared with oil
and powdered with drysaltery, I used to think that Flying Ma-
chine Brown was right.

Gradually, as the quiet hum of the school and the amber light
lulled his senses, little Hannibal leaned his head against Ethel
James's shoulder and fell asleep.

VIII

BERT GOODERICH'S great day came when he least ex-
pected it, came when he had resigned himself to his in-
evitable black ignominy on examination days. Colonel
Corinth-Squires, with his fierce grey moustache and gold-
rimmed glasses, was examining the school. I am at a loss to ex-
plain why a retired military gentleman should be deputed to pro-
nounce upon a school-teacher's efficiency; but there he was, and
there, for all I know, he may be still. Even Flying Machine
Brown came away with fugitive honours in spelling. He was
the only one who made anything out of " misled " that was not
palpably wrong, and stimulated by such unimagined erudition, he
put up his hand when Alder, the clever boy in the front desk
Who collected the books and was considered a rank favourite,
failed with " ecstasy." The Senior Assistant Teacher was
frankly amazed that Brown, alone of all his class, should be able
to spell " ecstasy." Brown himself was a little dazed by his own
luck. But perhaps Flying Machine Brown knew more about
ecstasy than the Senior Assistant Teacher. He had more of it in
his life, anyhow.

But Bert Gooderich looked on at his friend's triumphant prog-
ress in consternation. Brown was playing him false. Brown
had never shown any learning in class before. He was mak-
ing up his mind to " have it out " with Brown afterwards, when
he heard the Colonel asking each boy what he would like to be.
Now this was a question Bert could answer with a rapidity and
conviction unusual even in clever boys. No one had ever asked
him this question before, and he sat tense and tingling all over as
he listened to the answers. Alas ! the boys in the clever phalanx
were not satisfactory in their ideas. Most of them did not know
what they wanted to be. One of them, in despair, decided that
the question was not fair, they had never been taught any an-
swer to it. Now and again came a definite call. Macpherson,
who had been under an operation early in life, wanted to be a
doctor ; Harvey, whose parents kept a sweet-shop in the Finsbury

36

CASUALS OF THE SEA 37

Road, was going to be a barrister; and Hillier, who could draw,
voted for architecture. But these were only the few sparks of
ambition flying up from a general smoky mass of uncertainty.
Flying Machine Brown brought an almost unbearable amount of
notice upon himself, for every one turned round and looked at
him as though they had never seen him before, when he said,
" Ingineer, sir," and the Senior Assistant Teacher smiled cruelly
and grimly. And then it was Bert's turn, and everybody, having
turned round to look at Brown, remained so, looking at Bert.
But Bert saw only the Colonel, and when the keen eyes behind
the gold-rimmed glasses fixed on him, something inside him made
Bert stand up stiffly, his chin up and his shoulders pressed down
and back. *' Soldier, sir" said Bert Gooderich, and waited,
trembling, for the end of the world.

But there was no roar of derision. The Senior Assistant
Teacher looked curiously at the little tableau, the fierce old
martinet looking straight Into the soul of the unkempt lout at
the back of the class. He felt as if this was not his business.
It suddenly occurred to him that the Colonel was a soldier.
He had never realised it before.

" And by heavens you shall be ! " shouted the old Colonel,
staring at Bert's rigid figure and obstinate face. And to hide
his emotion he turned to the papers on the teacher's desk.

The examination was over, and Bert Gooderich went home in a
trance.

IX

THE usual sudden emergence into young womanhood hap-
pened when Minnie was seventeen, and almost imme-
diately afterwards she had a young man. " Boys "
ceased to curvette on cycles about the end of the Maple
Avenue, and Minnie herself no longer held court at the back
entrance in Wood Lane. The lengthening of the dresses to
within nine inches of her shoes, the acquisition of a Japanese
silk blouse, and the abandonment of a plait for a Langtry coiffure
made Minnie impossible to " boys." For two years she had been
working as a " retoucher " in the big photo factory up the hill
by the " Cimitry " and had learned all there was to know about
the positive side of life. Her plain-spoken comments paralysed
her mother, who occasionally weighed her daughter's soul against
the twelve shillings a week paid for retouching. But the latter
won as a rule. Minnie was quite able to take care of herself.
Her temperament was " difficult," and the casual philanderers
who worked at the factory could make nothing of her. One
young man who followed her home after dark appeared next day
with a piece of plaster on his cheek, and proved very reticent
about the adventure. This was Minnie's own fault, for she
chose her girl-friends among those whose reputations were con-
tinually under discussion at the chloride troughs, and who were
never seen at the corrugated mission near the railway. The
philanderers felt the baulk keenly because they were fastidiously
careful to leave respectable girls in peace. Many of them were
married men, with girls like Minnie of their own.

But the advent of the young man put an end to all this, and
Mrs. Gooderich sang a Nunc Dimittis in her heart. After all
her anxiety — for she had been anxious about her love-child all
her life — Minnie was going to be a nice, respectable, refined
young woman. The young man was stooping, Mrs. Gooderich
thought, for he was a coal agent's clerk, and dwelt daily in a
small office near the station, an office with a mahogany truck
full of best household in the window. He was a fattish, serious-

38

CASUALS OF THE SEA 39

looking young man, careful, neat, church-going, insured. Minnie
was lucky. So many girls, etc.

Minnie was calm as ever at this time. The favour of the
young man's acquaintance was won tritely enough. For a short
time he had been an inmate of that spare bedroom, and Minnie
sometimes made his tea. It was not good tea, and I take it as
a sign of infatuation that the tea, as made by Minnie, did not
drive him to the world again. But when he had taken her for
several walks, and had returned from one of those walks, with
an understanding, the innate delicacy of the coal agent's clerk
prompted him to seek lodgings elsewhere. It would look better,
it was agreed. The stigma attached to " lodgers " in the suburbs
was intolerable to a serious young man. And then came the
ring.

Minnie was pleased with the ring. She had a number of
spurious ornaments, the usual trash that young girls carry on
their wrists and neck and fingers, but this was a thing of price,
four pounds ten. He had kissed her when he had slipped it on,
on the teak seat that used to snuggle against the old red wall
opposite the Cherry Tree Inn, and Minnie submitted. I do
not know if it will explain anything of Minnie's character to
the reader, but to me it is significant that kissing was abhorrent
to her. And since serious young men with small bank accounts
think kissing is indispensable and proper and delightful, this
diffidence on Minnie's part was a source of microscopic estrange-
ments, though nothing else could have held him so effectually
in her toils. " Your breath does smell ! " she had remarked
once, with terrible calmness, and he had been stricken to a red,
angry silence. He was not an imaginative man, and he was
quite incompetent to deal with a girl like Minnie. He did not
realise that a fancy waistcoat and a well-groomed head of hair
are almost negligible factors in the great game, that a young
woman is a human being with all five senses cruelly alive.

Another rock on which everything was almost wrecked was
his dislike of her employment. He wanted her to chuck the
photo factory, " since she was engaged," and Minnie's eyes opened
wide with astonishment. "Why, if you please?" she asked
with icy politeness. And he had mumbled something about " the
fellers up there." Mrs. Gooderich, too, incautiously seconded
this motion, and Minnie explained that her intention was to re-
main in the photo factory as long as she pleased; if they didn't

40 CASUALS OF THE SEA

like it, they could lump it, so there ! And the scheme fell through.

Sometimes the young man wondered, in his new lodgings, if
he were not brewing trouble for himself, Minnie was so tem-
peramentally different, and he would think, " Never mind, when
we're married, she'll settle down and be a good little wifie."

Bert Gooderieh, earning his living at the local furniture em-
porium, lived his life very much apart from his sister. He was
surprised enough when she got a young man, it is true, but his
mind was taken up with other matters. He was going into the
Army very soon, and you cannot expect a young man to take
much interest in his sister's affairs. Apart from a detached,
sarcastic attitude, assumed only at home towards the young coal-
agent's clerk, they entered not at all into Bert's cosmos. Bert
offered him " a fag " once, when he came to supper, but the young
man did not smoke, which was another trait that Minnie made
into a painful deficiency of manhood.

" Don't smoke ! " echoed Bert, from the middle of a dense
cloud of Wild Woodbine. " Why, you ain't born yet, then. You
don't know you're alive, mate."

"You be quiet, Bert," said Minnie; "you'd be better with
less of it."

" Oh ! What about you, young Min, eh ? "

The young man looked at Bert with a sudden suspicion.

" Mind your own business," said Minnie.

" Ditto, ditto, ol' sport," replied her brother, and dismissed
the matter from his mind.

But the young man could not so dismiss it. He had that
horror of girls smoking that goes with his environment. He
was like that. The only women he had ever known to smoke
were the decolletee adventuresses in novels. The suspicion that
Minnie might smoke in secret was torture to him. And he mused
wretchedly, as he walked homeward, what might she not do?
What did he know of her whose waist he held nightly on the
seats distributed about the lanes of Southgate, whose demure
eyes looked him over and sized him up with such relentless com-
posure ?

" You're not treatin' me fairly, darling," he fretted the next
evening. " Why don't you be straight about it? "

" Oh well ! " she squirmed, and moved a little away from
him. They were standing on a wooded footbridge that crossed

CASUALS OF THE SEA 41

a wide shallow stream. A brougham came down the lane, the
two brown horses lifting their feet delicately and throwing
fantastic shadows on the high bank at the side. Within they saw
a man and a woman, beautifully dressed, bound for the big
house behind the pond up the hill. As the carriage rolled slowly
through the water the woman leaned towards the open window
and saw them standing side by side, and smiled. And Minnie
grew angry, and watched the carriage glide up the lane, glide
out of sight, leaving them alone again.

" I think it's my right," the young man insisted.

"Is it?"

" To be straight, yes. Of course, if you're sick of it H

** I didn't say I was. Only, if you will nag so "

"Who's naggin'? I'm straight with you, aren't I? Nobody
can say I'm not patient and all that."

Minnie was thinking of the brougham and the girl who leaned
out and smiled. Why could not she have luck like that? To
be poor, and slave, like her mother, to be for ever darning and
cleaning and living close! She had not smoked a cigarette for
years. Even when she had done so, it had only been the school-
girl's dare-devil desire to see what it was like. If the wretched
young man would only leave her alone, she would possibly never
have touched them again.

" Well, it's no use goin' on like this," he said in a low voice
as they stood at the gate in Maple Avenue. A clear, full moon
flooded the road and threw sharp black shadows of the trees
on the roadway. Across the way, in the big house at the corner,
they could see the family at supper behind the great plate-glass
windows. They could see the beautiful room hung with en-
gravings, the soft pink shades of the candles on the table
illuminated the scene, the heads bent over the food, the swift
skilful servants moving round, the tall clock in the corner with
its slow-moving pendulum of gold. The gate of No. 12 creaked
a little as Minnie moved it to and fro.

" I must have an understanding," he added firmly.

" Must you ? " she said sharply, turning to him so
that he quailed. " Well, let's go indoors and you shall have
it."

" Minnie ! " he said appealingly, but she walked up the little
tiled path, ignoring him, and he followed.

42 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Her mother sat at the table in the front room, sewing by
the light of a smelling oil-lamp. Mary Gooderich had changed
greatly in the course of eighteen years.

" Sit down, dear. I'll get supper in a minute." She looked
up and saw Minnie's face.

" What's the matter ? " she asked.

Bert lounged in from the kitchen, smoking, and sank down
on the sofa.

" The matter is I'm not goin' to be nagged at all my life,
mother, and so I tell you."

" I've not nagged, Mrs. Gooderich. I've only asked her a
plain question and she won't answer it. Nobody belongin' to
me is goin' to smoke, that's all I can say."

The young man paused for breath. His rather plump features
were drawn with conflicting emotions, his satin tie was rucking
up over his collar, and his hands fumbled with the edge of the
worn red baize tablecloth.

" What's up — lovers' tiffs ? " queried the recumbent Bert in
amusement. Minnie blazed at him.

" You be quiet ! And nobody's goin' to nag, nag, nag for
ever and ever at me, that's all I can say," she snarled at her
lover. " You get somebody as likes it. I don't." And taking
off her ring, she tossed it to the middle of the table.

The young man held to the edge of the table and watched
the ring circle about and fall to rest, the tiny stones glinting
in the lamp-light. Bert's cigarette stuck to his upper lip as he
opened his mouth in his astonishment.

" What d'you mean ? " said the young man in a cold, lifeless
voice.

" There's your ring, that's what I mean."

" I've not deserved this," he answered dully.

" There's your ring, and don't have so much to say, next
time."

There was a brief silence that seemed centuries long. And
then the young man slowly picked up the ring, and went slowly
out of the house. As the door closed behind him, Bert struck
a match, a crackling tearing sound that finished with a hiss and
a spurt of flame.

" You've done it now, young Min," he observed critically.

" Done what? " she turned on him hotly.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 43

"Why, strangled yourself." He drew at the cigarette for a
moment. " I'd 'a' thought you'd 'a' had more sense. Fellers
ain't so easy got." And he lounged away, leaving mother and
daughter alone.

THAT act of very deliberate and unnecessary cruelty by
which Minnie Gooderich freed herself from the tram-
mels of betrothal would have been impossible but for
her economic independence. Minnie was a girl with a
hyper-sensitive brain and atrophied affections. As a schoolgirl
she had had her chums like Ethel Turner, but now Ethel Turner
couldn't bear her. Minnie bore this with fortitude, again be-
cause of her economic independence. If you are earning twelve
shillings a week in a station of life where you can live on ten,
your attitude towards the world of Ethel Turners will be mildly
superior. ^ It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one /
may weather in safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold.)
Mrs. Gooderich, who knew well enough why her daughter's chin
was held so high during supper that Friday night, spoke her
mind.

" You wouldn't be so free with that tongue of yours, miss, if
you had to keep yourself away from home."

" I'd like to be on my own. I'd manage some'ow," she mut-
tered.

"Would you? You're welcome to try. You'd soon find a
man's arm useful."

" Oh, mother, don't ! Can't you let me alone ? I don't want
a man's arm. I want peace."

Mrs. Gooderich was silent until Bert took himself off, yawn-
ing, to bed. Then she went round to her daughter's side and
put her arm round her. She did not speak, only leaned forward
and strove to search the girl's eyes. Ineffable maternal solici-
tude ! Her arm tightened round the small waist. Minnie looked
up from her plate.

"What, mother?" she asked uneasily.

" Child, I'm not goin' to blame you, as you ought to be blamed
for hurtin' a man as loves you true. I'll leave that to your own
thoughts. What I do say to you is, don't think as your mother
don't know 'ow you feel. Look at me, Minnie. No, you're not

44

CASUALS OF THE SEA 45

your mother over again. I know that well enough. I used to
wonder, when you were a little thing, what you'd be like when
you grew up. I 'ardly dared think, sometimes. I've seen how
restless you've been, and I hoped bein' engaged 'ud settle your
mind. You 'urt him, my child. I'll tell you 'ow I know, because
you 'urt me often. Minnie, I've wondered sometimes, if you only
knew 'ow near I've been to wishin' I'd never give you birth, or
if you'd ever understand 'ow near to screamin' I've been for you
to put your arms round my neck an' tell me — tell me jus' little
secrets."

The mother paused, looking intently into her daughter's face.
At length she whispered:

"Child, I'm afeared for you. You 'ave no weakness!"

With unerring precision the mother's instinct had found the
trouble and voiced it with blundering poignancy. But the child's
face was like iron.

" Minnie, didn't you, don't you love that man? "

" I don't think I did, mother. It was all a mistake."

" I can't believe it of you. And yet, I dunno. There, go
to bed, child. We'll be sittin' here all night."

It was about an hour later that she went upstairs with the
small lamp that hung in the passage, and shading the flame
with her hand, threw a monstrous shadow on the wall of her
daughter's room. Then, standing by the bedside, she let the
light fall on the girl's face.

"Yes, mother?"

Minnie lay on her back, one hand behind her head, the fingers
entwined in the dark hair spread over the pillow. Her breast
rose and fell gently like a ship at anchor in some quiet harbour.
And her dark eyes, darker than ever in the sudden light, were
wide open and fixed on her mother.

Mrs. Gooderich set the lamp down on the chest of drawers
and sighed.

" Child," she said, " haven't you anything to tell your mother? "

Minnie was silent, looking at the ceiling.

" You can't think," her mother went on in a whisper, " what
it means to me to have not a soul to say a word to. Don't you
ever think, Minnie, what you are to your mother? "

" I don't see what that has to do with it," said Minnie, shifting
uneasily.

"With what? With what you did to-night? It's the same

46 CASUALS OF THE SEA

thing, my child. You 'urt 'im same as you 'urt me, 'cause you're
that 'ard."

" It's no use talkin', mother. I can't help what you say, I
didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't know I did hurt you, just
because I'm — peculiar, I suppose you'd call it; only it don't
seem very peculiar to me not to be silly. That's all."

When Minnie had been small and little Hannibal just born,
there had grown up in the vague hinterland of their mother's
mind a picture of herself in later years, surrounded by her
children as by a wall, protecting her in her decay. That pic-
ture had slowly faded. The last flickering outline disappeared
as she stood with locked fingers looking down at her daughter.
The time generally comes when a mother can see a dim but
true outline of the future. But she gains the power to see this
at the expense of the power to alter it. Mary Gooderich, looking
down at her daughter, felt bitterly the futility of her life.

Slowly she took up the lamp and went to her own bedroom.
" 'Ard," she muttered, " as iron. She'll go wrong. I can't stop
'er now. She's too quiet. If she'd only cry! Dear, dear! I
can't remember when she did cry."

For some little while after her mother left her, Minnie lay
awake in the dark, watching the square of moonlight degenerat-
ing into a more and more slip-shod rhomboid on the wall. At
times she could feel the bed quiver slightly as a heavy night
goods train thundered over the Great Northern Railway a mile
away. She had always felt that infinitesimal flutter of the earth
beneath her body as she lay in her bed. At length she slept,
smiling a little. The curtain moved gently to and fro between the
bed-head and the window like a ghostly wing.

The next morning was Saturday, and Minnie joined another
girl on the way to the photo factory. The other girl was in
the office. She was trembling with a piece of " news."

" Do you know," she said, as Minnie swung into line with
her. "The shop's sold!"

"Gracious! Sold up, Ivy? "

" No, to an American firm. They've got a patent process.
Do you know what they mean by Tetratint work ? "

" I've heard of it, seen advertisements of it, that is. They
roll them off, you see, instead of givin' them to us to run over.
I thought it was a machine, though."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 47

" So it is. That's why I asked. They've got advice notes
that they've been consigned. The Tetratint Corporation of New
York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. They seem a very big concern.
They may give us all a rise," she tittered.

" I don't think," said Minnie sardonically. " More likely give
us retouchers the sack."

There was no more said at the time, and they parted at the
door of the works, Minnie to her easel, the other girl to her
desk. A man in grey striped flannels, a pot-bellied man with a
red clean-shaven face and red hair, was in evidence at intervals.
Before the morning was half through it was distinctly under-
stood that this man was not asking questions but giving orders.
He would stand, hands in pockets, paunch protuberant, an
enigmatic figure in the doorway. Girls seemed as though
mesmerised by him. He simply stared at them absently until
they turned to look. This was to pick out " rubber-necks."
It is a modification of the third degree. Some girls blushed,
some bridled, some blundered, some rose and fiddled with articles
in their jacket pockets on the hooks. For some twenty minutes
lie stood there chewing a pencil or tapping it against his teeth,
until the fourteen girls out of fifteen were in a state of nervous
collapse. They had gradually grown to regard themselves as
art specialists. They stood for " taste " in a barracks of flying
machine-belts and printing frames. They had cultivated the
artistic temperament, by which I mean they drank too much tea.
You could have seen, had you climbed up the drain-pipe outside
the high clear windows, their lips working convulsively and their
eyelids twitching. You cannot, if you are still in the teens and
highly strung, you really cannot endure the silent scrutiny of a
stranger for twenty minutes, especially if you have had two
cups of over-steeped tea for breakfast. If any one had been
able to scale the drain-pipe and peep in suddenly, these fourteen
girls would have shrieked themselves into hysteria. One or two
jumped and bit their lips when he moved slowly across the floor
behind them. He paused, hands in pockets, by Minnie's easel
and examined her work. Minnie proceeded. She was nervous,
but not having the artistic temperament, her nervousness was
visualised as aggressiveness. She could hear the man's watch
ticking. She looked up sharply.

" What is it? " she asked, and the sound of her voice slackened

48 CASUALS OF THE SEA

the frightful tension in the atmosphere. She could hear the
other girls using handkerchiefs and shuffling their feet, but she
kept her eyes on the man.

" Just you go on," he said in a low drawl, nodding his head
gently. " Don't you mind me a bit. I'm just havin' a look
raound."

" I can't work with somebody watchin' me," she retorted,
shifting the mirror that threw the light on the underside of her
negative.

The screw needed adjustment and she moved a little to get
at it.

" Can't you ? Well, if that don't beat all ! " he remarked,
rubbing his chin, his head on one side. For another moment he
paused to look her over, and then walked thoughtfully from the
room.

A titter, impossible to localise, began in the room. It gathered
in volume, broke into a splutter here and there, sharpened to a
squeal in a young thing with a plait, and died away to sharp
hissing whispers.

"Miss Gooderich, how could you?" came from the next girl
but one, throwing her head back and then forward to gain a view
of Minnie's face.

"If he'd spoken to me I should have screamed!" announced
another girl.

Minnie made no comment. Perhaps her self-possession could
be partly accounted for by her preoccupation with the larger
problems. One cannot always permit the juggernaut personality
of an employer to roll over one's mind. There had been a
vibrant quality, a passion, in her mother's voice the night before,
that had impressed Minnie in several ways. She had received a
short but vivid glimpse into her mother's soul, and she had
realised suddenly how impossible it would be to confide. Each
member of the family seemed a stranger to the others. Bert's
lumpish jocularity and candour was but a plant of forced growth.
So she pondered as she worked. Indeed, when the red-faced
man had paused behind her, Minnie had been asking herself the
classic question, "Why not?" Why not get away from her
sordid surroundings, the strained relations, the coal-agent's clerk?
She was thinking especially of the last when she looked up
sharply and spoke.

At a quarter to one, as she rolled up her black alpaca apron

CASUALS OF THE SEA 49

and set her gear straight, Minnie was still turning her affairs
over in her mind. In the lavatory there was much whispering
and larkish laughter concerning tennis, for the girls had a
court in the neighbouring recreation ground. Minnie did not
belong to the club. The subscription was five shillings, one
had to buy a racket and shoes, and Minnie, though a quick
worker, a vigorous walker when bound anywhere, loathed violent
exercise. Her ideal was something quite different. Before this
book is ended, you will have a clear notion of what that ideal
was.

XI

AT one o'clock Minnie was standing in the secretary's
private office. Some of the girls had already entered
and emerged before her turn came. They emerged
holding a business letter instead of the usual small
cash envelope. Now as she stood by the table the secretary
pushed an envelope from the pile by the cash-box towards her.
The red-faced man in the striped flannel suit stood at the desk
turning over a file, wetting his thumbs at times. On the envelope
was written " W. Gooderich. 12s." The secretary, who came
down from the London studios every Saturday, wore a preoc-
cupied air.

He noted the name and amount in his book, and said, " There
you are, miss. Kindly read the notice enclosed, and send Miss
Milligan in. Good morning."

A presentiment of disaster seized Minnie as she made her
way out with the envelope in her hand. As a general rule she
walked home through the recreation ground, and along the
ballasted line path that brought her out upon the railway bridge.
But to-day she took the road by the cemetery, and when she had
walked round the bend she opened the envelope. A half-sov-
ereign and a florin lay at the bottom, and taking out the coins
she put them in her purse. Then she drew out the letter, slowly
unfolded it and read it.

The British Tetratint Company,
402, South Berners Street,
W.
Dear Madam:

In view of the extensive alterations in the company's process
work, I am instructed to inform you that your services will be no
longer required.

Your engagement will therefore terminate on the Saturday
following receipt of this notice.

Yours faithfully,

Joseph Myers, Secretary.

Miss TV. Gooderich,

50

CASUALS OF THE SEA 51

It was a habit of Minnie's to talk to herself when she was
walking alone.

"So that's it, is it?" she mused. "Wouldn't he be glad if
he knew! He'd come tryin' to make it up. And mother 'ud
back him up. And I really believe mother will be glad too.
She'll think it's a judgment on me for bein' saucy. I don't
care! I daresay I can get a situation at a distance. Oh, Lord,
how I hate this place ! ' Dear Madam ! ' " she mimicked. " I
think I'm a pretty cheap madam at twelve shillings a week and
find yourself. Miss W. Gooderich is no longer for sale at that
figure, my dears, and don't you forget it. She's goin' out to
have a look round."

And tearing the letter into very small pieces she dropped
them through the cemetery railings. There was a species of
ritual about this deliberate rending of paper. Minnie was
unconsciously celebrating the new momentous cleavage in her
life.

From a worldly point of view, there seemed little to engender
joy in the young woman's heart. Yet indubitably did she
mount the hill with a swing of body and poise of head that had
been absent in the morning. At the cross-roads at the top she
paused, considering. The sudden appearance of the American
woman interrupted her.

" Well, Minnie, finished, I suppose? Where are you going? "

" Well, Mrs. Gaynor, I was going to the station."

" This afternoon, I mean."

" Oh, nothing particular."

" Then come with me. I'm going marketing."

"Are you? I'll only be in the way."

"Stuff! Come and talk to me."

" All right, Mrs. Gaynor."

They walked down Wood Lane, and separated at Mrs. Gaynor 's
back entrance. Minnie went up the garden into the kitchen.
Mrs. Gooderich was drying a saucepan of potatoes, holding it
carefullv upside down over a pan and shaking vigorously.

"Well, child?"

" Mother, you might as well know it at once. I've got the
push."

" Got the " Mrs. Gooderich put the saucepan carefully

on the stove and turned to her daughter.

" The push, mother. They're putting down machinery for

52 CASUALS OF THE SEA

some new process, and out we go. I do at any rate. There's
a new governor. It's a week's notice."

" Whatever shall we do ! "

"Do? I'm going to look for a job. I've had enough of it
anyhow."

" But you wouldn't give it up before ? "

" S'pose I wouldn't. It was different then. I can't help my-
self now. At least, I mean I can help myself. I'm goin' to have
a try anyhow. Hannibal Gooderich ! "

Little Hannibal, his coat and waistcoat thrown aside, was
playing ball against the house-wall. He was counting softly
to himself, for the idea is to make a record number of catches
from the rebound.

"What you want?" he called swiftly between two counts.

" Come here." Unwillingly Hannibal came, bouncing the ball
up and down. Minnie gave him a sixpence.

" Go to the station and get a Daily News, a Daily Chronicle,
a Daily Mail, and a Daily Telegraph. And bring back the
change."

"Can't I 'ave a penny?"

Minnie regarded him from beneath her level brows. He was
not a particularly desirable-looking child, with his snub nose, his
freckles, his torn knees and carelessly-tied boots. His hands
were filthy, the nails packed with black dirt, the knuckles
studded with warts which had been split and nibbled. He
was a suburban child, sheath upon sheath of grossness encasing
the glowing soul within. His mind, too, was sheathed with
material " wants." He wanted a penny, he wanted sweets, he
wanted papers with pictures, he wanted a fishing rod and sharp
knives, he wanted a bicycle. All these wants covered the divine
want within, which no one ever suspected. At long intervals,
as he grew, the child had glimpses of himself. Now it would
be the slow majestic flight of the rooks as they sailed back to
their nests in the woods at eventide. Once it was the mysterious
chime of the bells at Old Southgate Church coming muffled and
thrilling through the frozen air of a winter night. Or at times
the thunder of the heavy night-mail beating up the Northern
Heights in flame and glowing cinders, roused the innermost soul
of him, so that he would climb the railings by the line path, his
chin pressed against the pointed stakes, and hold on, screaming
for joy. But these were mere temporary obsessions. The world

CASUALS OF THE SEA 53

saw but a dirty child, given to truancy, bell-ringing, and petty
nuisances. He stood there with the sixpence in his palm, crav-
ing a penny.

" Get out of the way, do ! " said the mother on the road to
the scullery. "What d'you want papers for, Minnie?"

" Advertisements, of course," the girl answered impatiently.
" Go on, Hanny. You can have a penny." The boy leapt
away, tearing at top speed down the garden and out into Wood
Lane. The next moment he was back.

"The Daily whats?" he asked. Minnie repeated the names
of the journals which were to show her the way to fortune,
and Hannibal vanished.

" That boy runs wild," said his mother, from the scullery.
" But I can't keep him in. These long 'olidays ! Six weeks !
And clean an' cook, cook an' clean day in day out. You'll go
to the factory next week, Minnie? "

" Not if a job comes along before. I'll take the first tiring
that offers. It'll be a start. Mrs. Gaynor asked me to go with
her this afternoon. Marketing she calls it."

" She goes to Finsbury Park. You might get 'alf a pound o'
Gil ray's butter for me. It's better'n anything here at a shillin'."

" All right. But I'm going to look at the papers after dinner.
It's funny her askin' me though."

" I can't make 'er out," said Mrs. Gooderich. " She's always
talkin' over my head. It's all very well 'er tellin' me this, that
an' the other about management, but I can't do it. The other
day she says to me, 'What d'you want lace curtains for? I
don't 'ave curtains.' And look at 'er front room. There's noth-
ing in it."

" There's room to move in it," remarked Minnie, nursing her
knee. Mrs. Gooderich, wiping her hands on a roller towel, re-
garded her daughter suspiciously.

" That's your idea ! Why have anything in the house at all ?
As for curtains, everybody can see straight in when you're sittin'
in Mrs. Gaynor's front room. Not that she minds! "

" You can see straight into the room at the Lodge," said
Minnie. The Lodge was the big house opposite.

" That's pride. They want people to see their nice things.
I wish you'd lay the table."

" Mrs. Gaynor, she has her meals in the kitchen," said Minnie
maliciously.

54 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" That's a nice way o' livin' ! You'd like that, I s'pose ? "

" Saves trouble, anyhow. This front-room business is all
fiddle-faddle, tryin' to live like people with millions."

Minnie rose and went to lay the table in the front room,
taking off her hat as she went. That front room, with its
horsehair furniture, often offended her. The table was too
big for the room, the bamboo table in the window slewed to
one side on its shaky legs, while the mantelpiece was piled high
with ornaments and things that are known as " knick-knacks."
Sometimes Minnie wanted to sweep that wondrous edifice of
knick-knacks to the floor with one mighty crash. This was not
the artistic temperament surging out in righteous wrath against
Victorian tendencies, it was an ebullition of hatred. Those vases
and bowls signified, in their dreary useless emptiness, the dreari-
ness and uselessness and emptiness of the Maple Road spiritual
atmosphere. Those fly-specked cards and photographs were
blatant with the false ideals of Maple Road. A New Year's
card from their cousins Amelia, Florence, Thomas, and John,
children of their father's sister at Camberwell, was propped
against the paternal shag-box. Often Minnie's lip had curled
as she read the turgid doggerel, " dear " rhyming with " Year,"
" lour " with " hour," and " thine " with " syne."

This attitude of Minnie's towards the gentle hypocrisy of
our lives must be remembered later on, for it helps to explain
why she seemed so pitilessly brave, so naturally unconventional.

While she laid the table Hannibal came in with the papers.
He looked longingly at the change.

" Here you are," said Minnie, giving him a penny. " Now
run away. I want to read." She sat down on the sofa by the
window, shook out the vast sails of the Daily Telegraph, holding
them at arms' length and knitting her brows. Here was the tug
of war.

Out of the innumerable legends on that mighty banner she
was to select one that would bring to her salvation. What
a wonderful panorama it was, all those flats, hotels, bungalows,
and " upper parts " to let, all those agencies going begging,
those Broadwood pianos going for twenty pounds, those columns
of situations vacant ! Minnie let her eyes wander over the sheet
for a few moments before she settled down to the business of
noting addresses. She read down the money-lenders' column
with a perplexed look on her face. What could they mean?

CASUALS OF THE SEA 55

Was it possible that, by going to one of these angels of mercy,
one could get any sum, from twenty-five to twenty thousand
pounds, in three hours? Though varied in phraseology, the
essence of all was identical. By dropping a card, by 'phoning a
message, by pressing a button, one might say, you had any sum
you liked to name, " without Fees, Fuss, or Farce," " simply on
note of hand," " in a few hours ! " Some were more modest than
others. From them you could only get five thousand, but it was
" with strict privacy."

If you were of good family, a retired major, and public-
school man, would protect your sensitive spirit from the coarse
world outside. Minnie wondered what it all meant. Why did
people remain poor ? " Why go bankrupt ? " asked one advertiser
indignantly. Why indeed?

She turned to the " Situations Vacant." There is something
very relaxing to the mind in reading advertisements of situa-
tions when the reader is one of the unemployed. The interest
is so continually tightened and loosened, the future looks rosy
and black with such monotonous alternation, that the mind
becomes flaccid and incapable of judgment. So it was with
Minnie. She read them all, from the Accountant wanted in
Cairo, who got seven hundred a year and had to know French,
German, Greek, Arabic, and some Italian, down to the Young
Lady Companion wanted by an Irish lady residing in Yoko-
hama, who got no salary and a Christian " Home." Between
these two extremes of prosperity and competence lay a welter
of travellers, bodice-hands, porters, drapers' assistants, errand-
boys, and window-cleaners. Minnie saw them all, hustling as
in one big stairway, climbing, stumbling, pushing, getting on
each other's backs, tripping unwary juniors and slightly-bald
seniors, each for himself. Minnie was in no way foolishly
ignorant of these tilings, she had seen the struggle for existence
go on up at the factory. Indeed, it was the vivid contrast, in
her mind, between the real strife and the pretended good-will
in men that roused the sardonic in her. She had known brisk
young men circulate tales about seniors so that their chances
of advancement might be bettered. She remembered the very
brisk youth who had borrowed money from So-and-so and had
then spread a rumour that So-and-so lived as a blood-sucking
usurer. She knew of happenings more scandalous still among
the young women who had shared her labours up the road.

56 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Only one item seemed at all possible, Minnie thought, after
a few minutes of elation and depression. A Young Lady was
wanted to nurse a delicate child. Duties light, and most prob-
ably the salary was equally airy. But there was nothing for a
young woman skilled in the enrichment of photographic negatives.
No one wanted a retoucher to proceed at once to Bolivia, at a
large salary, to fake portraits. She put the Telegraph down
and took up another paper. And then her mother came in with
the dinner and the three of them sat down to the table.

"Hadn't you better write to your Uncle George about it?"
suggested Mrs. Gooderich. Uncle George was the father of
cousins Amelia, Florence, Thomas, and John. Minnie sniffed.

" Uncle George wouldn't thank me to do anything of the kind,
mother. He's not over in love with any of us."

" He might know of something," vaguely answered her mother.

" I'll try myself, next week."

Mrs. Gooderich was silent. She would have mentioned do-
mestic service, but she knew that Minnie would " bite her head
off" at the first words. And like most mothers, she did not
believe that her daughter knew anything about keeping house.
Little Hannibal, absorbed in the possibilities of a Saturday
afternoon with a whole penny to squander, was too busy eating
and pondering to ask questions.

" Well, don't forget the butter," said Mrs. Gooderich as Minnie
put on her hat.

"All right. Anything else?" she answered absently. She
was deep in thought as she walked slowly up to Mrs. Gaynor's
door.

Mrs. Gaynor lived with her one child in a mysterious way.
She never did anything " for a living," she never seemed in
want, and yet she never spent any more than her neighbours.
Her domestic economy was extensive and peculiar, and had
puzzled others besides Mrs. Gooderich. She talked often in
a religious way, yet she never went to chapel. The curate
lifted his hat to her, and the Wesley an minister made an
obeisance when he met her, and yet they could not claim her as
a communicant. It was whispered that she owned her house,
that she was a miser, yet richer than the folk at Maple Lodge.
She could not afford lace curtains, apparently, yet it was
rumoured that she had plenty upstairs in drawers. After a
while the continued discussion of her peculiarities became stale.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 57

She remained while the neighbours vanished, some by day, others
by night. Her boy, whom no one had ever seen in a linen
collar, frolicked joyously in a red jersey and corduroy breeches,
a suburban anomaly. People ceased to make remarks. Mrs.
Gaynor was an institution. She never asked for credit, and
proclaimed herself no lady by bringing her purchases home her-
self, and so preventing tradesmen from sending inferior articles.
The coal-agent's clerk had once revealed a professional secret
by remarking that Mrs. Gaynor always ordered her coal, and
paid for it, at summer prices, instead of buying it by the hun-
dredweight. Such was the lady with whom Minnie Gooderich
was to spend the afternoon.

I

XII

4 1 "J^T'S funny you askin' me to go out to-day, Mrs. Gaynor,"
said Minnie, as they stood waiting for the train. " Be-
cause I got a week's notice this morning."
"You did? What have you been up to?"

" Nothing. They've sold the company to an American firm,
the Tetratint Company."

" You're not worrying? "

Mrs. Gaynor was a simply-dressed woman of slender frame,
grey-green eyes, and very thin but expressive lips. She looked
seriously at Minnie, and the girl laughed.

" That's a funny question to ask, Mrs. Gaynor."

" It's essential. Most people miss essential questions. If you
tell me you're not worrying, I know at once how to answer
you."

" Yes, I am worrying. Who wouldn't, when I don't know
when I'll get another job? "

"Worry won't get you a job, child! What do you want to
do?"

" Anything."

The train came in, and they took their seats. Mrs. Gaynor
waited until they had passed through the Wood Green tunnel
before she spoke.

" I don't mean by that, ' what do you want to do for a living ? '
I mean what do you want to do with your life ? "

" I want to live, Mrs. Gaynor, not simply exist ! I'm tired
of sticking round here, year after year, just muddling along.
Mother " She stopped and bft her lip.

"Go on. What of mother? Mothers are poor things any-
way, I know."

" You're laughing at me now. I don't know why I can talk
to you better than to mother, but I can. My engagement's broken
off, Mrs. Gaynor."

"Who did that?"

" I did, and I'm not sorry, either," defiantly.

" Girls of your age aren't sorry for anything except thero-

68

CASUALS OF THE SEA 59

selves. I know that. Did you break it off because you want to
live, instead of existing? "

Minnie pondered a moment and then nodded.

" Very well, then, get on with living. Can you pick and
choose? "

" Of course not. I'd have to take anything that offered."

" Why not go to a registry office. There's always plenty of
places for housemaids. English women are so shiftless that
they must have them, and they don't know how to keep them
when they get them."

" Housemaid ! I don't like menial work," said Minnie.

" Menial ! Where I was born, child, there wasn't such a word.
You'll have much more chance of living in a woman's kitchen
than in her husband's factory. I don't suggest it as something
to last for ever. You're too good to make a life-long drudge
of. But you want to educate yourself, and find out what life
is. Then you can live it, as you say. I know a good deal
more about life than you, Minnie, and I'm suggesting something
that's more remunerative than what you've been doing."

" Housemaids only get twelve pounds a year."

" Do they ? They get twenty in places, and all found. Can
you save twenty pounds a year at photograph work? There's
an old friend of mine keeps an office in Kensington, and if you
like to go there, she'll give you some advice."

" What's a servant want to educate herself for? " said Minnie,
poking the opposite seat with the umbrella.

" You don't know what may happen. You don't know what
is the matter with you, but I do. We've had girls like you in
America for years. You want to spread out, you want all sorts
of freedom, and you don't know how to get it. Instead most of
you break your mothers' hearts and do ridiculous things. And
all the time you miss what you're after — life."

" Have you got what you're after, Mrs. Gaynor? "

" Surely, child ! I live my life and am happy. What more
can one have ? "

" I want more than just bein' happy/1 said Minnie intensely.
" I want money, lots of it, and I want to go about. All round,
you know. I'd like to go to Paris! "

" That's natural," said Mrs. Gaynor placidly, her hands folded
in her lap, and her grey-green eyes watching the enamelled
hoardings that flew past the window. " Perhaps you will some

60 CASUALS OF THE SEA

day. Many a beggar would ride if he only wished hard enough.
Most beggars I know are beggars because they couldn't wish,
didn't know how. I'm telling you how you can learn to wish."

" That sounds funny."

" Not funny, strange. Here's Finsbury Park."

" Strange, then. Would you put your own daughter to it, if
you had one ? " said Minnie, as they alighted.

" Depends on the daughter. She might be very different from
you. You've got a real strong mind. No one knows what you
may do, some day."

" Do you mean murder ? "

" My gracious, child ! Why do you say such things ? Murder !
Well now ! You say that ? I didn't expect it."

" What do you mean then ? "

" I don't know. I can't see. This engagement of yours — I
can't see what's to replace it. . . . No. . . ."

Minnie Gooderich, walking beside Mrs. Gaynor up the Seven
Sisters Road, was perplexed at this conversation, though it was
Mrs. Gaynor's accustomed tone. Mrs. Gaynor herself looked
perplexed too, but her face cleared again.

" Well, child," she said, her thin lips smiling. " Do you
worry now ? "

" No," said the girl. " I'd forgotten to. One gets talking,
and there you are."

" Not altogether. Perhaps somebody else is wishing you not
to» That helps, you know, helps wonderful."

Minnie felt her scalp tingling intolerably. She set it down
to walking in the sun.

" Here's Risk's Sale on," she said. " Let's go in, Mrs. Gay-
nor." That lady shook her head. Like most mystics she was
very practical.

" Why, don't you believe in sales ? "

" Sales are like everything else in this country," said Mrs.
Gaynor. " They're splendid things for those who are well off.
If you were a rich young woman and wanted two or three party-
gowns, you could get them shop-soiled and cheap and yet good.
That's a bargain. So with white goods. But if you go in there
to get odds and ends cheap, you'll only be buying trash."

In spite of this wisdom of the world, Minnie paused to look.
Messrs. Risk's windows were choked with the merchandise of
a Summer Sale. In a few weeks they would be choked with

CASUALS OF THE SEA 61

that of an Autumn Sale. Mr. Risk himself, having sold the
business to a company by guaranteeing a dividend for a stated
period, now bred shorthorns and Irish terriers in Hertford-
shire seclusion, while the company strove to build up more
business by selling their goods at half the cost price. This
system demoralises buyer and seller alike, and Mrs. Gaynor
would have none of it.

It was drawing towards evening when they reached Fins-
bury Park again, and sat down on one of the seats beneath the
rustling trees of the drive.

" I've been wondering what you really meant, Mrs. Gaynor,
when you said I had a strong mind. Does a strong mind, and
brains, and all that, bring in any money ? "

" Not always. It's a great help though, because you can see
where money is. I was thinking you'd probably get views as
you grow older, and begin to spread them."

"Me!"

" Sure, you. Wait till you've been out in the world.".

" I don't know much about views, but I know I'd like plenty
of money, and I like people with brains in their heads."

" Well, just you stick to facts a while. I'll send you to Mrs.
Worrall, and she'll have something for you."

" Very likely I'll have plenty o' views when I've been house-
maiding a bit," observed Minnie.

" You might get something else."

"What?"

" Companion. Rich Englishwomen are pretty queer. I'll
write to Mrs. Worrall about you. Just you call in on Monday
morning and see her."

The word " companion " pave Minnie food for rich and splendid
dreams during the week-end.

XIII

AT three o'clock on Monday afternoon, Minnie Goode-
rich, clad in a neat black skirt, print blouse, black
jacket and straw hat, entered a fancy-shop in the
neighbourhood of South Kensington Station. It was
a large fancy-shop. You could purchase anything from a
paper-weight to a Gladstone bag, from a bottle of ink to a fire-
screen. Within its large glass door you could feel an atmos-
phere of rich refinement. Unconsciously you trod softly; you
modulated your voice to the well-bred drone of the west. A
counter piled high with stationery ablaze with the insignia of
the wealthy occupied the left side. To the right extended cases
of expensive leather goods, paper-knives of onyx and ivory,
fountain-pens of wrought and jewelled metal, prayer-books that
retired empresses might finger. Beyond this banked and ter-
raced merchandise stood a telephone-box. Through the glazed
panel Minnie saw a lady communicating with the beyond, her
lips moving rapidly yet without a sound. Beyond again, was
a ground glass door labelled " Office," a discreet, genteel-looking
door, a door that had immense possibilities. A young woman
with thin classical features was busy behind the counter, her
head just visible above a cabinet of brass wherein reposed sample
armorial bearings of many colours and intricate design. As
Minnie stood within this genteel emporium of useless articles,
the young woman leaned over the heraldic cabinet and exam-
ined her. One glance was sufficient. The young woman re-
turned to her occupation.

" Is Mrs. Worrall in ? " asked Minnie briskly. The young
woman raised her eyebrows.

" She is engaged."

"Give her this letter, will you?" And Minnie passed over
a square white envelope. The young woman took it by one
corner and read the address.

" Is there any answer? "

CASUALS OF THE SEA 63

"Yes, there is, and I'll wait for it," answered Minnie
sharply. The young woman went into the office.

" Come this way, please," she said when she returned, and
Minnie stepped forward. The young woman closed the door,
and Minnie found herself confronting a stout, richly-dressed
lady who was seated at a roll-top desk covered with papers.

"Take a seat. What can I do for you?"

Minnie sat down and told her.

" So I see by Mrs. Gaynor's letter. Have you had any ex-
perience of housework?" Minnie shook her head.

" Or of secretarial duties ? " Another shake.

" But, my good girl — but let me read the letter through.
Hm — hm."

Minnie watched the woman's face as she turned the letter
over, and her eyes moved slowly down the page.

" H'm — I see, I see." For a few moments Mrs. Worrall
remained in deep thought. Then she took a sheet of paper
and a pen and wrote rapidly a few lines. This she folded and
put in an envelope, sealing it with green wax.

" I can do nothing for you here," she said. " My connection
is entirely among ladies who expect their maids to have testi-
monials from the aristocracy. As for a post as companion,
my clients expect applicants to be of the aristocracy, I think.
But if you take this letter to this address " — here she wrote
the address — " you may be suited. That is all I can do."

"Is this a situation?" asked Minnie, rising and taking the
letter.

" Possibly. I wish you success, as you are a friend of Mrs.
Gaynor's. It refers to a post I could not offer in the usual
way, for certain reasons. It would damage my business. You
understand ? "

" Can't say I do, ma'am." The lady smiled.

" Mrs. Gaynor remarks in her letter that you have much to
learn. If you will deliver that letter — take a 'bus to Chancery
Lane — you will begin to learn. Good day."

And Mrs. Worrall resumed her labours at the roll-top desk.

As the 'bus lumbered eastward, Minnie pondered over the
mysterious quest upon which the quiet American woman next-
door-but-one had started her. What might not happen? In any
case, was not this infinitely preferable to the humdrum monotony
of working at the factory and walking out? How glorious the

64. CASUALS OF THE SEA

world was! All this press of people, the green of the parks,
the roar of traffic! Why had she never broken away before?
There was a snap of mischief in her eyes as she glanced around
her. A youth sitting behind her on the 'bus imagined her to
be making eyes at him. He coughed to attract her attention.
Minnie turned again and froze him with a look.

The address on the letter was to Mrs. Olga B. Wilfley, 29b,
Clifford's Inn, Strand. Minnie was in a complete and very
natural darkness as to the nature of an Inn. She did not sup-
pose it to be a public-house. Perhaps it was a hotel. The
mystery which surrounded the whole business seemed summed
up in this address. 29b was a novel in itself. In a short time
it would be explained. In the meanwhile she lived in a simmer-
ing ecstasy on the top of the lumbering 'bus. Knightsbridge,
Hyde Park, Piccadilly, all passed in brilliant sunshine before
her. This indeed was the world. She noted with quick eyes
the girls leaning back in victorias which waited at the curb by
Swan and Edgar's and Peter Robinson's. They were rich, of
course. The sunlight flashed on the silver of the harness and
the silk of the coachmen's hats. The 'bus halted, passed on
down Haymarket, and she had a glimpse of St. James' Park,
with the Government buildings overtopped by Big Ben.
And then Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, and the Strand, all
for threepence. Minnie leaned over and addressed the driver.

"Clifford's Inn? You git down at Chancery Lane, miste,
that's what you do, for Clifford's Inn ? "

Minnie enquired what sort of place it was. The driver told
her it was " chambers," which was none too illuminating to a
suburban girl. He had a brother-in-law, he averred, who had
a hawker's licence, and hawked studs and bootlaces and other
small haberdashery, and he kept his stock at the porter's in
Clifford's Inn. It was handy too, for a hawker, when rain
came on, 'cause there was an archway-like. Thrippence a week
he paid for keeping his stock there o' nights. Funny old place,
with grass an' trees too, right bung in the Strand. The driver
rambled on with his monologue, just as his horses rambled along
the Strand. Was Miss up from the country? Minnie, with
that sudden asperity of hers, replied, " Yes, from Green
Lanes!" and the driver resumed his lifelong study of horses'
ears. At Chancery Lane, Minnie got down.

Somewhat numb from her ride, she discovered the passage

CASUALS OF THE SEA 65

which leads to the Inn. Her simmering ecstasy had faded,
she was less confident of success. Airs. Gaynor, now — what
led her to expect so much of Mrs. Gaynor's influence? She
marched into the courtyard and stared. She caught sight of
a railed-in lawn with trees, and walked through another arch-
way, keenly interested. Was it possible people lived in such
queer old places still. Yes, there were people sitting on the
seats beneath the trees. Several of them were asleep; one, a
woman, was sitting motionless, reading a book. Nothing stirred.
The roar of the traffic had fallen to a faint hum. You might
almost imagine a magician's spell over this quiet nook, every-
thing suddenly fixed in its place for unnumbered years. It
was like, it was like, — Minnie struggled with her stock of
imagery for a moment — like a convent, it was so calm, so still
on that warm afternoon. What quiet people they must be who
dwelt in these black old houses ! A tall young man in a black coat
and silk hat, and carrying an attache-case of yellow leather, came
through from the Chancery Lane entrance and walked past her.

"Which is :29b, please?" said Minnie, suddenly. He paused
at once, and looked at her keenly. He had a keen face, his nose
was sharp, his eyes were sharp, and his voice, when he spoke,
had a sharp metallic way with consonants that reminded one of
a machine.

" I am bound there," he replied. ** May I have the
pleasure? "

Minnie Gooderich did not resemble a maidservant as she stood
regarding him from beneath her straw hat. Those were the days
when straw hats were in vogue in all walks of life. Moreover,
those were the days when the Inn harboured folk of all descrip-
tions. You never knew, Anthony Gilfillan was wont to say,
whom you might know, in Clifford's Inn, in those days. He
himself, witli his yellow attache case, was eager, anxious, burn-
ing to know everybody. Without ado he led the way round the
qindrangle. and made a gesture for Minnie to enter the porch.

" A lovely day," he observed, glancing keenly at the girl
reading on the seat. " Quite a monastic place this, for the
centre of London. But perhaps you do not know the Inn?"

" No," said she, clearing her throat. " I've come to see a
Mrs." — she referred to the letter — "a Mrs. Olga Wilfley."

"Oh, really? My hostess. Her flat is at the top. You
know she has an ' At Home ' to-day? Do you know her? Well,

6<5 CASUALS OF THE SEA

excuse me asking all these questions. Mind these stairs, they
are rather steep, aren't they? They had peculiar ideas of com-
fort in the eighteenth century, don't you think ? "

The eighteenth-century's ideas of comfort were not more
peculiar than Minnie's ideas of the eighteenth century. When
they had ascended two floors, she paused for breath.

" Excuse me ! I forgot how fast we were walking. Shall
I go up and get a chair? Take my arm."

" Oh, no, thank you. I — look here," Minnie, in spite of her
protest, touched his arm. " Look here, you're making a mis-
take. I've come to see Mrs. Wilfley about a situation. There! "

She expected him to draw away, apologise, and quit her.
But Mr. Anthony Gilfillan did nothing of the kind. He re-
garded her face keenly, her ungloved left hand resting on his
sleeve, her slim straight figure resting against the broad sill of
the landing-window. A type-writer clicked behind a heavy door
near them.

"Indeed! I wish you success. Can I be of any service?
If you will tell me your name, I shall be delighted to introduce
you to Mrs. Wilfley. That is," he smiled, " if you do not object.
My name is Gilfillan, Anthony Gilfillan."

" Mine's Wilhelmina Gooderich," said Minnie.

"And you are come about a situation?" Mr. Gilfillan set
his attache-case on the sill and showed no desire to rush to Mrs.
Wilfley 's " At Home." " I take it you are, then, of Mrs. Wil-
fley's persuasion?"

" I don't know what you mean," she answered shortly. " I've
an introduction to her, but I shouldn't know her if I fell over
her, I'm sure."

" I see."

" She's not — touched, off her head, is she ? " asked Minnie,
with a sudden suspicion, born of Mrs. Worrall's guarded man-
ner, shooting through her mind. Mr. Gilfillan laughed and
checked himself. He reflected that he had always considered
that to be his own private joke against Olga Wilfley.

" By no means ; Mrs. Wilfley is a very shrewd woman of the
world. Shall we go up ? "

As they turned the last corner of that interminable staircase,
a low insistent murmur of conversation and a tinkling of teacups
reached their ears. The door of the flat was open to either side
of the landing, and a messenger-boy, his hair oiled and brushed,

CASUALS OF THE SEA 67

stood at the stair head. Another messenger-boy, whose head
was even more oiled and brushed, strutted across their field of
vision with a tray of bread and butter. A man and a woman
followed, the woman listening with head on one side as the
man explained something with pats of fingers on palm. The
woman lifted her head and saw Mr. Gilfillan.

" Oh, Mr. Gilfillan ! " she sailed right at him, hand held
high, face all smiles, effervescing a sort of welcome. Mrs. Olga
Wilfley's welcome was always more like a glass of soda water
than a glass of wine. It sparkled and fizzed, but there was no
heat in it. Her hand dropped listlessly from yours, which is
the true test.

A few words of polite enquiry, as the oiled and brushed boy
relieved him of his hat and case, and Mr. Gilfillan turned to
the girl at his side, now really nervous and therefore, being
Minnie, trembling to be on the aggressive.

" Pardon me. Let me introduce Miss Gooderich — Mrs.
Wilfley."

" So good of Mr. Gilfillan to bring you along," she purred.
" Do go in and have some tea. There will be music presently.
. . . Who is she, Tony?" she whispered, as Minnie walked
with extreme agitation through the nearest doorway.

" Lord knows," he replied, blowing his nose unnecessarily.
" I found her trying to find your place — says she wants a
situation — so I fetched her up."

"A situation?"

"Yes, she's a letter for you, from somewhere."

" But she may be a servant ! "

" Quite likely. I didn't know you took any exception to
servants. Beneath the innumerable sheaths of the Self there
is but one universal individual soul, eh ? "

u Tony, you scoffer ! Go and look after her, and see she
doesn't steal the sugar-tongs."

Minnie's conjecture, dim enough, that the people in these
old houses would in some way resemble them did not live long
after she entered Mrs. Wilfley's flat. She found herself stand-
ing near the door of a large room with a gabled roof of dark
rafters, from which hung rusty lanterns fitted with electric
globes. The walls were of brown paper, apparently: the furni-
ture, as far as could be seen from the people sitting on it, was
" frightfully old," just as the people themselves were fright-

68 CASUALS OF THE SEA

fully modern. A grand piano sprawled in one corner. Brass
candlesticks, snuffers, pistols, china-pugs, Japanese prints, pen-
and-ink " sketches," old china, Bartolozzi prints in circular
frames, and all the other rubbish of refinement were nailed to
the brown-paper walls or lay on the antique bookcases, making
it difficult to find a place for a really modern cup and saucer
or a plate of fairly recent meringues.

The people themselves may be described in the aggregate as
journalists. One or two of them had written books, but I think
they were really journalists. One or two had money of their
own, and they wanted to be, really, journalists. They were all
dressed passably well — the women in short-sleeved summer
blouses with low necks, the men in black frock or morning coats
with white slips in the opening, — and they all had a certain
ease of manner, a certain facility of expression that was hard to
distinguish, at times, from real knowledge and culture. But
this facility was rarely felicity. Their tropes and metaphors,
for example, were not so true and biting as Minnie's, though
she felt too strange just then to know that.

Mr. Anthony Gilfillan entered the room briskly, and shook
hands with several people. He then sat down beside Minnie
and began to chat with her. A messenger-boy brought two
cups of tea and another offered a plate of cucumber sandwiches.
It was a characteristic of Mrs. Olga Wilfley to use messenger-
boys for purposes other than sending messages. Her great
ambition was to have a private orchestra of commissionaires.
She habitually used the piano for a reading desk, and in her
bedroom you might have seen roses in beer-mugs. The bedroom
itself was for the occasion turned into a cloak-room tended by
her charwoman and a red-haired messenger-boy. Fixing electric
lights inside rusty old lanterns gave her real joy, for her joy
was quaintness. It was, as we have seen, very quaint indeed for
Minnie to come " about a situation." It was deliciously quaint
for Tony Gilfillan, the bad boy, to drag the girl upstairs as a
guest. The whole thing, in fact, was so irresistibly quaint that
the hostess stood in the doorway, not ineffective in her silver-
grey against the green portiere, and observed the bad boy talking
to his protegee, and so cold-shouldering the lady who did the
phrenological departments of Stoney Cuts and the Rambler.
This, roughly, was the conversation of Mr. Gilfillan and the rap-
idly-calming Minnie.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 69

"Won't you have some tea, just to revive you after the
stairs? "

" Thank you." Boy presents cups.

" And some cucumber sandwiches ? You remember that bit
about cucumber sandwiches in the first act of ' The Importance
of Being Ernest'?"

" Thanks." Boy presents sandwiches. " No, I don't go to
theatres much. I live so far out, you see."

" Oh, you do not live in town ? "

" No. That is, I live in North London."

" You mean the suburbs ? "

" Yes," with sudden asperity, " but you needn't rub it in ! "

" No, because that's where I live myself."

"What, in ?"

"Stamford Hill."

" I know that. I thought you lived " Minnie paused.

" In this sort of place? No, I'd rather be shot."

" There's some places in the suburbs I'd rather be shot than
live in."

" Have you been coming to London to business ? "

" No. I've been working at a photo- finishing works.
They've sold the place to an American firm and I've had an
Irish rise. That reminds me, I've a letter for Mrs. Wilfley.
You make me forget what I came for," she laughed.

" Well, that's just what I was out to do," he confessed. " Let
me hold your cup. It's empty, will you have some more? "

" Yes, please, I'm thirsty." He rose to find a boy with tea.
Mrs. Wilfley came forward and sank like a grey cloud on his
chair.

"I'm so glad you came, you know, Miss — Miss . . ." her
voice trailed off dreamily as she caught some one's eye across
the room and smiled. " Mr. Gilfillan tells me you wanted to
see me."

" Here's a letter from Mrs. Worrall," said Minnie, turning
round for her sandwich plate. Mrs. Wilfley took the letter,
perfectly conscious that every woman in the room was observant
of her movement.

"Thank you so much. Will you excuse me a tiny moment?
We are going to have some music before the lecture. A friend
of mine is poing to sing one of the quaintest Spanish songs.
D'you mind? "

70 CASUALS OF THE SEA

"No, I'll wait till you come back." And Minnie munched
Iler sandwiches.

" Awfully pretty rooms, these of Mrs. Wilfley's," said a deep
contralto voice on Minnie's left, and she jumped. She was
unaware that introductions were superfluous for light conversa-
tions at Mrs. Wilfley's " At Homes." The phrenological lady
of Stoney Cuts and the Rambler leaned toward Minnie and re-
garded her with favour mingled with criticism. Minnie, waiting
until her mouth was empty, replied that such was the fact.

" Excuse me," boomed the voice again, " but are you a
j ournalist ? "

"Me! Good gracious, no!" ejaculated the girl.

" Ah ! " The lady again regarded Minnie's phrenological
development. " I thought you were, you know. Awfully clever
woman, Mrs. Wilfley. You've read her, of course?"

" No, I haven't, ma'am. I'm afraid I don't know her very
well." The lady's glance became a stare.

"Sorry. I did not catch your name?"

"Didn't you?" The sudden asperity was just rising to the
occasion with some swift suburban argot, when the gallant Mr.
Gilfillan returned with her replenished cup.

"Ah, Miss Rathstein, how are you? Are you supplied?
Very warm, isn't it? I've been opening a window or two at the
back. Yes, it is sugared, Miss Gooderich. Miss Rathstein —
Miss Gooderich." He sat down between them and crossed his
legs. " Have you seen Bowman lately ? Is he safe for an arti-
cle after all?"

" Yes," said Miss Rathstein, suddenly recalling that she also
was safe for five guineas if Bowman put in that article.

" Miss Rathstein is a very old friend of mine," said Mr. Gil-
fillan to Minnie.

Some one struck chords on the piano in the other room across
the landing. Mrs. Wilfley appeared at the door smiling quaintly.
There was a general rustle and movement towards the other
room.

" Let us stop here," whispered Mr. Gilfillan, laying his hand
on Minnie's arm. Nothing loth, she sat down again. She was
outwardly calm, intellectually excited, socially adrift on an un-
known sea. Mr. Gilfillan was a new species to her, in particular.
His attention was vigilant, yet the feminine instinct in her could
lay hold of nothing. His whisper had nothing in it beyond the

CASUALS OF THE SEA 71

bare literal meaning. He gave her the impression that she was
the one person in the world he wished to speak to, yet he made
no call to her sex. His keen eyes were animated, yet she de-
tected no flash of desire.

The quaint Spanish song was soon in full swing. The lady
who sang it had spent a month in Grand Canary, and had been
fascinated by the native airs. In Clifford's Inn, a month at
the Santa Catalina Hotel qualifies you forever as an authority
on Spanish music. She sang it rapidly in a high tinkling voice.
She did not understand the meaning of the words. If she had
I doubt if she would have sung it. That, at any rate, was the
opinion hazarded by Mr. Gilfillan to Minnie, and I often used
to find myself in accordance with his opinions. He had a very
fair familiarity with decorative Spanish acquired while working
in a power station at Antofogasta.

"Don't you like music?" Minnie asked.

" It is an agreeable noise," he smiled. " But do you know
what that lady is singing? "

" Mrs. Wilfley said it was to be Spanish, I think."

" Would you like to know what it is about ? "

" Is it — saucy? "

" Sauce, yes. Rather hot to the pnlate."

" Oh, well, I'd like to know then," she dared, looking at him
at last as she was accustomed to look at people.

Mr. Gilfillan was somewhat taken aback. He plumed himself
on his capacity, his proved capacity for reading character. He
maintained it was half the battle in his business, which was com-
pany promoting. But to find himself so very correct in his
diagnosis of a casual acquaintance staggered him.

"You won't blame me afterwards?"

"As if you cared! "

" I do. I care about the opinion every one has of me. If a
man, or a woman, thinks wrongly of me, I would spend a great
deal of time and money to put them right."

"What on earth for?"

" It all counts, in business."

" Does it? Are you in business? "

" I am an engineer."

"Are you? My dad's an engineer."

"Oh, really. Where is his office? I don't know the name."

Minnie indulged a titter.

72 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" His office ! He works at McMuirland's, in the City."

" Manager ? "

Minnie flushed slowly. " No," she replied. " When I said
work, I meant he's a workman."

" Then he is a mechanic. The word engineer is wrongly
applied to many branches of industry. Your father, for in-
stance, is engaged in carrying out work designed by engineers
— I know one of the McMuirland's — just as a bricklayer,
plasterer, or stone-cutter is engaged in carrying out work de-
signed by architects. An engineer is one engaged in controlling
and applying the forces of nature to industrial purposes. He
is engaged in the advancement of mechanical science, as our
Charter of George the Fourth explicitly states. It is important
that every one should understand that."

The quiet voice finished with a click. It was natural for
Anthony Gilfillan to take the trouble to explain this to a young
girl. He would have explained it with equal lucidity and en-
thusiasm to an old woman. . . . He gave every one the credit
for having as good a brain as himself. He himself was inter-
ested in all the details of another man's life and work. He was
not shocked to find himself talking to an artisan's daughter. He
himself was a bootmaker's son.

The quaint Spanish song rattled to a quaint conclusion of
abysmal double-meanings and the lady pulled down her veil,
took her gloves, and made her adieux. Several others expressed
themselves desolated to miss the lecture, and Mrs. Wilfley smiled
on the landing.

" How are you two getting on? " she asked roguishly, coming
towards them. " Oh, Miss Gooderich, I'm so glad you came.
If you can only wait until after the lecture?"

" Certainly," returned Minnie, watching Mrs. Wilfley with
some curiosity as that lady accepted a cigarette from Mr. Gil-
fillan's case. " I'll wait until you are at liberty."

" Thanks so much. It wants talking about, you see."

Minnie supposed it did, though she was still mystified. Mrs.
Wilfley sailed away.

" Do you indulge ? " The cigarette-case lay on Mr. Gilfillan's
palm, open and tempting. Minnie's eyes wandered round the
room for a single brief instant in a scared way, and then her
hand reached out and took a cigarette.

" Thank you," she said, and he struck a match.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 73

" I prefer a woman to smoke/' he observed, " but she must
do it because she likes it. Now, so many only light them and
incur a headache."

Minnie wondered what the young man in the coal-agent's
office would have said now. As a matter of fact, tobacco did
soothe her nerves. She plunged into conversation.

" What is the lecture about ? " she began.

Mr. Gilfillan fixed her with his deeply-set eyes. His face
had the tenseness of an ascetic, the deep eyes of a visionary,
the alertness of a man of business.

" Do you — but of course you don't — know anything about
Oriental religions ? " Minnie shook her head, bored in an-
ticipation.

" You have heard of missionaries ? " She nodded.

" Going from London to India ? " Another nod.

" Well, you will now see a missionary come from India to
London, to convert us to her own religion. Come, let us go in
and get a seat. You don't mind if I sit next you ? "

" Not at all, Mr. Gilfillan. I should be very glad, since I
don't know anybody."

" I have a reason for asking that," he returned in his crisp
clicking voice, as they moved towards the door. Minnie won-
dered what that reason might be, but she was arrested in her
reply by surprise at the change in the appearance of the other
room. Orange-coloured curtains were being drawn over the
windows by the messenger-boys, mellowing the light. At a table
stood a tawny-skinned woman in a dress of yellow silk, looking
straight before her with large prominent eyes. She looked
rather effective in the dim orange-light, her wide nostrils flaring
now and again as she exhaled. Other people in the room were
grouping themselves about the lounges and chairs against the
windows. Mrs. Wilfley was whispering here and smiling there,
directing messenger-boys as they removed the plates and cups.
She benmed upon Mr. Gilfillan and beckoned with her eyes.

.Minnie sat down near a small bronze devil from the East and
gave herself up to confused thought. The whole business
seemed so astonishingly unreal that she might have expected, had
she been imaginative, to wake up in Maple Avenue, N., and find
Clifford's Inn a dream. What would the coal-agent's clerk say?
What would he say? She was not imaginative, and therefore
she was unable to tell herself what he would say. She heard

74 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Mr. Gilfillan saying something. No imagination was needed to
secure Mr. Gilfillan's opinions. You had them clicked into your
ear in excellent English, French, German, or Spanish, accord-
ing to your nationality. If you were a mother he talked bicycles,
babies, and bassinettes, urging the superior resiliency of inflated
rubber as a tyre for your infant's vehicle. If you were an
astronomer, he presented you with a novel and soul-searching
variation of the pyknotic theory, a variation that impressed
you even though it might have made Vogt turn in his grave.
If you were a teacher, his views on teaching a plurality of
languages would confound your more practical brain, and he
would admit, with a smile, that though he was a visionary on
these matters, his daughter had been educated on his own prin-
ciples and with much success. If you were by any chance
artistic, he would produce a drawing cut out of Jugend or the
Figaro, and it would pay you to listen to his opinion of D. Y.
Cameron, of whom he had an early example. And so, since
Minnie was an inexperienced young woman at an advanced
theosophical seance, he provided her with information concern-
ing that science, information as well-ordered as an algebraic
formula, as luminous as one of his own highly-patented electric
lamps.

It is true that she did not comprehend a great deal of Mr.
Gilfillan's definitions. Those who live, even in a small way, in
the world of ideas, gradually adapt common speech, to their
own ends. Mr. Gilfillan, who lived in a very extensive mansion
in the world of ideas, though his house at Stamford Hill was
only rated at thirty pounds, did not, acute as he was, realise
that, when he used the word " sympathy," Minnie was not think-
ing of a general emotion but of black-edged handkerchiefs at
a funeral. So, too, when he said " association of ideas," Min-
nie's mind thought of co-operative associations and political
clubs. The saying " Death is, to them, only a recurring incident
in an endless life," recalled recurring decimals to her mind.
" Goodwill " was to her simply the goodwill of a business, which
is the only form of goodwill ever heard of in suburban life.
Minnie certainly had heard the phrase " Glory to God, good-
will to man," but that was poetry, — it did not count. Alto-
gether, Mr. Gilfillan's whispered preliminary did not assist
Minnie very much as she sat eyeing the bronze devil near by.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 75

And then the tawny woman at the table began to speak, and
Minnie began to understand.

There was no preamble, no introduction, no firstly. The
tawny woman proceeded, in a low penetrating voice, to outline
the latest discoveries of her sect concerning the mystery of
existence. " If," said she, " we dissect a common flower " —
and Minnie's attention was riveted. She had dissected a com-
mon flower.

"If we dissect a common flower, we find sheath after sheath,
and in the centre the ovule. Within the ovule which is but an-
other sheath, we find the nucleus, within the nucleus we find
the nucleolus. This is the embryo of the future plant. This
holds good throughout all nature and super-nature. The ovule,
the eggy lying quiescent, patient, waiting for the male influence
to begin its fertilising work. Without conjunction all will be
in vain. So it is with the world of yesterday and to-day. The
world is composed of sheath upon sheath of protective needs and
interests, within we find masses of nutritious knowledge sur-
rounding the nucleus and nucleolus of passionate desire, waiting
palpitatingly for the coming of the Sons of Mind. So it was
when Sakya-muni came, so it was when Jesus came, so it is
now ! "

It may be doubted if the speaker of these and many other
similar sentences really understood what she was saying. She
certainly had no knowledge of the ranging impressions which
she made upon the different persons in her audience. Minnie
remembered the lectures on the differentiation of sex in flowers,
though she had not expected so peculiar an application of bo-
tanical facts. Mrs. Wilfley sat smiling, intently absorbing it
all for purposes of adaptation, for she was an expert pilferer
of ideas. She saw that a dextrous combination of the Sons of
Mind and the Son of Man would " rope in " many more into
her " public," for she had a public. The ideas and terminology
of the lecturer were at that time only just emerging from the
brains at Benares, and Mrs. Wilfley saw their possibilities for
quasi-religious literature. Mr. Gilflllan was also smiling a little,
but he was not absorbing. Probably because he was a Son of
Mind. He seemed too penetrating to absorb anything. A
journalistic barrister and a dramatic-critic near him looked
firmly at their boots, for they were believers. When you be-

76 CASUALS OF THE SEA

lieve in a religion that forbids intolerance and frowns on prosely-
tism, you must look at your boots or perish.

" We must not be led away by illusions as to our own great-
ness. We must do the petty duties of the home ere we gird up
our loins to accomplish the mighty deeds of a Mahatma. We
must feel ere we can conquer. We must endure agony and sweat
ere we rise in triumph. We must advance, stage by stage, death
by death and life by life, till of outward wrapping the Arhat
is ultimately free, and we can enter into Nirvana, the place of
Peace and Rest."

It was a short lecture, as lectures go, yet they felt as though
they had sat for a long time. Minnie felt a certain relief as
people rose to pass into the other room, and Mr. Gilfillan's voice
clicked in her ear. The tawny woman passed through curtains
over a door at the back, and messenger-boys invaded the rooms
with coffee and comestibles. A hum of conversation rose, the
deep growl of the journalistic barrister mingled with the cul-
tured modulation of a lady in black silk. Mr. Gilfillan pointed
out to Minnie a picture representing Mr. Richard le Gallienne
carrying a lady's petticoat over his arm. She saw no humour
in it. He called her attention to a photograph of Mrs. Wilfley,
dressed in a loose robe, one hand on a marble pedestal, her profile
showing effectively against a dark background, her eyes raised
in the manner now immortalised in " The Soul's Awakening."
To emphasise this, a copy of that picture hung near by in an
inconspicuous corner, for Mrs. Wilfley had a great deal of that
cleverness which consists in knowing just how much people will
stand. She knew that artistic, Bohemian people disliked " The
Soul's Awakening," but she also knew that they unconsciously
made an exception of Olga Berenice Wilfley, author of The
Licencees of Love. She was aware, also, that a new influence
was in the air, and she meant to work that new influence for
all it was worth. Yes, the hard rationalism of Huxley and his
followers was done for. Religion was going to have another
turn. The soul was awakening, and Mrs. Wilfley was right
there with the goods.

XIV

MINNIE'S ideas of the poetry and sensuousness of life
had been formed to a great extent from the works
of Augusta Wilson. At the Mercy of Tiberius had
stirred her depths when she had read it, some years
before, and, though by now the impression had dimmed, it was
still there. St. Elmo and Infelice (pronounced English style)
were fine, but Tiberius was terrible. If her somewhat cool
temperament had ever permitted her to soar and dream a silly
girl's dreams, she had imagined herself in the future as a Beryl
Brentano against the world. Perhaps her occupation having
sometimes to do with Christmas Cards and being at any rate
artistic, assisted her, for did not the stately Beryl, in the inter-
vals of melodrama and to stave off the romantic poverty of New
York City, design Christmas Cards? Truly the Brentano de-
voted herself to her handsome brother, and the beauty of sacri-
ficing anything to either Bert or Hannibal had not been revealed
to Minnie, who generally skipped the affectionate parts of stories
and of life. But Tiberius himself, handsome, stern, blue-eyed,
impossible either to gods or men, seemed to her a good working
ideal; and now Mr. Anthony Gilfillan, quite unconscious of the
honour done him, for he was a widower with a young daughter,
was raised to the shadowy throne and invested with the awful
attributes of a Lenox Dunbar.

One by one, two by two, and in one case in a party of four,
the guests rose, shook hands in a way so distracting to Minnie
that she was hypnotised by it again and again, and departed
with messenger-boys in attendance.

" I find," said Mr. Gilfillan, ** that Miss Gooderich lives in
my part of London, so I'll return, if I may, and show her the
quickest route to King's Cross." And he looked keenly at his
watch, calculated with thumb and finger on chin for a moment,
smiled, turned suddenly on the waiting messenger-boy, accepted
his hat and attache case, and prepared to depart.

" There's no need to trouble," said Minnie, gratified.

77

78 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" No trouble at all. I have a call to pay in the Charing
Cross Road, I have ten minutes to get there. I shall be back
in an hour exactly. Till then. . . ." And he was gone.

Mrs. Wilfley looked at Miss Gooderich narrowly.

Miss Gooderich regarded Mrs. Wilfley respectfully, realising
once more that she had come " about a situation."

Mrs. Wilfley rose and stood by the grand piano, arranging
and re-arranging some flowers in a Chinese vase.

" I mentioned to Mrs. Worrall some time ago," she observed
with a new inflexion in her voice, " that my work and my health
would force me to secure the services of an assistant. Certain
circumstances " — here she paused effectively — " made it im-
possible for me to advertise through Mrs. Worrall in the ordinary
way. An alien influence at work, lack of sympathy in my as-
sistants, would prove to be a deterrent to my own efforts. I
scarcely " — Mrs. Wilfley smiled — " I scarcely expected to hear
from my friend so soon."

" Your friend must have made a mistake," Minnie said quickly.
" I couldn't be your assistant. I've no experience. I've been
in a photo factory."

" Ah, not immediately. My idea was, to train some one in my
own methods. The remuneration would be small for a time,
and then it would depend on yourself. You could begin learn-
ing shorthand and the typewriter, you know. I should prefer
to dictate. The drudgery of writing is so exhausting, and my
health is very precarious."

"What will the wages be, to start?" asked Minnie. Mrs.
Wilfley looked pained at such directness.

" Had we not better, perhaps, leave that for a week or two.
Shall we say, a probationary month?"

" I'd like to know what to expect," the girl persisted. " I'd
know where I was then."

Mrs. Wilfley 's pain increased. She coughed into her hand-
kerchief.

" You see, you have, as you say, no experience. Perhaps an
honorarium of eight shillings" a week "

" I've been getting twelve."

Mrs. Wilfley was sharp enough to realise a bargain. She
saw that this cool competent young woman might be the very
person she was looking for. She saw, moreover, that the young
woman might shy off if the salary were too low.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 79

" Well, shall we say twelve, after a probationary month? "

" I'm sorry I can't live on air even for a month, Mrs. Wilfley.
I knew shorthand at school, and I daresay I can soon pick it up
again. And I don't suppose the typewriter is very difficult. If
you'll give me twelve shillings a week I'll start to-morrow. I
shall have fares to pay too, a season ticket and all. It'll be a
tight fit for me, even on twelve shillings."

" Very good, then that is settled," knowing she could not get
a qualified woman to assist her for less than a couple of pounds
a week. " I do hope," she said, going over to Minnie and taking
her hands, " I do hope we shall be friends."

" Yes, I hope so," said Minnie, shrivelling a little at the gush.
" Will you tell me what I have to do? "

" To-morrow, to-morrow. I was intending to have some one
who could live here with me, or at any rate, in the Inn. When
I am in the mood, you know, I go on till I drop, and then per-
haps I cannot touch a pen for several days. It is the artistic
temperament."

" Oh ! " remarked Minnie. She was singularly helpless
against the mild gush usually affected by women like Mrs.
Wilfley.

"You like Mr. Gilfillan?"

" Yes, he is very nice," returned Minnie frankly. " He talked
to me all the time."

" I shall be jealous ! " with unendurable roguishness. " Quite
like some of those quaint romances one used to rave over. The
stranger-maiden fascinates the heroine's great friend. You
mustn't spoil our palship, Miss Goodcrich. But you must know
his little girl, such a jolly little kid."

" Is he married? " Mr. Gilfillan's attitude was now partially
explained.

" His wife died some years ago, poor thing. His sister keeps
house for him. So different from him. He is awfully clever.
Did you like Miss Rathstein? I saw you talking to her. She's
very clever. She writes."

During this monologue, Mrs. Wilfley was moving about, taking
up books, laying down books, shifting ornaments, finally seating
herself at the table and drawing a sheaf of papers from a locked
drawer. Minnie watched her dispassionately, thinking of Mr.
Gilfillan's little girl. So he was a widower. Mrs. Wilfley went
on talking, as she wrote on the margin of a sheet of MS.

80 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Did you like the lecture? But of course you found it rather
deep. Miss Angarali is so very advanced."

Minnie had a premonition that this sort of thing would prove
tiresome. She was unable to understand people like the lady
before her, who, without any ulterior motive and quite uncon-
scious, I believe, of the inanity of their conduct, judge heaven
and earth, past, present, and future, animate and inanimate,
phenomena and noumena, merely as all these things affect them-
selves. There is no sequence in their excogitations. Their
brains work like an exercise in Aim's First Course.

" Dante saw a vision of Heaven and Hell," you say.

"How quaint! Do you like Dante?" they query.

" I John, saw these things," thunders the prisoner of Patmos.

"I don't care for Revelation, do you? Too mystical for my
taste."

Minnie, possibly because of her plebeian origin, had a mind
of denser texture. Her opinion of Miss Rathstein, for example,
had nothing in it of like or dislike. You might as well have
asked her if she liked the grass in Clifford's Inn. Similarly with
the lecture. If Mrs. Wilfley had said, " Did you understand
the lecture?" she would have replied promptly, "Some of it."
But Minnie had no conception of the rack upon which the Olga
Wilfleys torture themselves, the rack of Culture which forces
them to fake matured opinions and fixed preferences concerning
all things that were ever seen in dreams or written down in
books.

As a matter of fact, this Board School girl had a clearer
conception of the processes used as illustrations by the the-
osophist than the journalist whose knowledge of flowers was
limited to colour, smell, and the extraordinary names in nursery
catalogues. Even at that moment, in a corner of the house in
Maple Avenue, were hidden those neat note-books, with their
little sketches in coloured inks, which " Old Piper " had marked
" V.G." and " Ex." with such keen pleasure. Nevertheless, she
sat quiescent, waiting for the return of Mr. Gilfillan. The
coarser mesh of her intellect allowed things like theosophy and
phrenology to drop through out of sight.

At length he came, within a minute or two of the hour he
had proposed to take. He was not flushed with haste: he seemed,
on the contrary, cooler than ever. Mr. Gilfillan was that sort
of man. He did not appear to be in the thick of one of the most

CASUALS OF THE SEA 81

exciting events in his career, namely, the flotation of an inter-
national syndicate. He had discovered, early in life, that the
world belongs to the enthusiast who keeps cool. Like the
mediaeval saints, he was consumed with a passion for converting
the world to his own way of thinking. Like them, also, he sat,
so to speak, up to the middle in snow.

Minnie rose, tingling, looking round the walls of the room,
after the fashion of one about to depart. Mrs. Wilfley shook
hands with Mr. Gilfillan in the manner already dear to Minnie
— hands held level with the chin.

"When shall I see you again, Tony?" said Mrs. Wilfley,
pushing her manuscript out of the way and rising.

Mr. Gilfillan, drawing his chin back into his collar, and strok-
ing the creases this formed, named a date.

" And there's next Sunday, you know. We're going out to
Richmond to lunch at the ' Greyhound.' "

Mr. Gilfillan protested he had forgotten, in the press of busi-
ness, the affair at the " Greyhound " at Richmond.

" But you don't mean to say you've forgotten and made an-
other appointment?" she cried. He thrust his chin sharply
forward, took it firmly in his fingers, and nodded, looking pen-
sive.

"I have done just that," he returned. "For once will you
excuse me? I have been somewhat preoccupied . . ."

He did not tell Mrs. Wilfley that he had, since the previous
morning, dictated a hundred and forty-two letters, held twenty-
one consultations with his board, spoken to thirty people on the
telephone, written fourteen telegrams and six cablegrams, and
paid several calls to solicitors, patent agents, and underwriters'
offices. It would be no use telling Mrs. Wilfley all this. She
would only simper and ask what the letters were about. He
did not tell her that he had come to her flat that afternoon be-
cause he hoped to see Miss Rathstein's employer as well as Miss
Rathstcin herself. He was not such a fool as to go to a City
Editor in his office. The man selling papers at the corner of the
street was probably in the pay of the rags which throve on
damning speculative businesses. He did not tell her that he had
gone to the Charing Cross Road because he might meet the City
Editor in the brand new vegetarian restaurant — that restaurant
which failed so brilliantly a year later — for the City Editor wa3
a vegetarian as well as a Theosophist. All this was going on

82 CASUALS OF THE SEA

and Mrs. Wilfley, "who prided herself on managing Tony, did
not know anything about it. He had no appointment, as yet,
to clash with the " Greyhound " lunch, but in the rush of the
past few days Mrs. Wilfley and her outlook on life had grown
distasteful. It was only a transitory indifference, of course,
for he knew to the full the aptitude of the lady in that art which
he himself cultivated so strenuously, the Art of Publicity. He
knew how useful to him she could be later on, when he hoped to
have the leisure to elaborate the details of his masterpiece, " Gil-
fillan Filaments Limited." How these two people of diverse
yet indisputable cleverness pursued their way up the secret
paths to fame and fortune, how they ultimately placed the girl
who now stood between them in a position that, to her own aston-
ishment (and their own as well perhaps), developed her powers
in a most unexpected way, will be told in its proper place. For
the present it will suffice to indicate lightly the limitations of
their intimacy.

The worldly relations of men and women often form an equa-
tion that cancels out without warning when some insignificant
factor has been added to either side. In the case of Anthony
Gilfillan and Mrs. Wilfley, Minnie was such a factor. Her
unwitting interposition had dissolved the kinetic forces at play
between them and left them in a condition of static apathy.
Even Mrs. Wilfley, though she had a certain slovenliness of mind
that rendered her inattentive to the niceties of psychological
analysis, was conscious of a change in the air as Mr. Gilfillan
and Minnie took their departure. For a brief moment a faint
suspicion, like the clouding of a mirror by a human breath,
crossed her mind, a faint suspicion that Tony was not unaware
of her wiles, and knew just how strong or how weak they were,
just how easily snapped. For a moment this mood was reflected
in her face. And then the absurdity of it made her smile.
That chit! Ridiculous! Why, she was vulgar and suburban.
Good material doubtless, but Tony would fly higher than that.
... A woman must have intellect to capture Tony, eh? . . ♦

And the breath of suspicion vanished, like any other breath.

While Mrs. Wilfley was indulging in these pensive reflections,
Mademoiselle Minnie and Anthony Gilfillan have got themselves
out of Clifford's Inn and are walking down Fleet Street. Unless
you remember that the gentleman was rather tall, wore a silk

CASUALS OF THE SEA 83

hat, and carried a leather attache case, you might not be able
to pick them out of the human tide that surged eastward down
that narrow gorge and swirled into a seething vortex at Ludgate
Circus. There they were, however, their shadows lengthening
on the flags before them, and at Cook's corner they turned into
the shadow and comparative quiet of Farringdon Street. Not
before the gentleman had bought papers, however, a pink paper,
a green paper, and a white paper, which he folded small and
put away in the attache case.

The conversation, it appears, was of season tickets and the
Expense of Life.

" It's robbery and imposition, I know, but they have you in
their power. That's why I don't live on that line. My line has
competitors, you see, and they are kept straight. People won-
der why Home Rails are moribund. No competition. In
business a man should love his competitor like a brother. Of
course you get the ten bob back when you give up the ticket."

" All these things make it very expensive to be in the City."

" True, but where else can you be ? The suburbs are merely
vast dormitories, where a man may sleep in comparatively pure
air, while his office is being washed, in fact. People complain
of their train services. I maintain that we who work in the
City should need but two trains a day — the first train and the
last train."

" That 'ud be a long day," commented Minnie.

" With a siesta — a rest during midday," he added, with a
far-away look in his eyes. " But I am a visionary in these
matters. You were saying ?"

" I wasn't saying anything, but I was thinking that there'd
be a riot if some of your ideas got about."

" Possibly, possibly. You dislike ideas ? "

"Me? No, I like people to have some ideas in their heads.
Precious few about in my part of the world though. And what
there are don't do people much good."

"How is that?"

"Well, look at this Tetratint idea. It's a good idea, and I
know it makes better prints than we can do, and so it ought
to be used. And it gives me the push," she added, without ill-
feeling.

" Perhaps a push is what you needed to make you get on.

84 CASUALS OF THE SEA

I owe my success to being pushed out of jobs too small for me.
An idea is really a brain-push. Sometimes it pushes a man to
success, sometimes to despair."

" There was a minister in our district, a very nice man, who
was a bit cranky in his ideas," contributed Minnie. " People
didn't know what he was, he preached such queer sermons.
Then he got the idea everybody went to heaven at last, and that
did it. He got the bag, too."

" A Universalist," laughed Mr. Gilfillan. " Fancy ! That
must have been a long while ago."

" I was a little girl and heard them talking about him," said
Minnie. " His ideas didn't do him much good."

" No. Mind the cart. Have you settled with Mrs. Wilfley ? "
he asked as they passed into Farringdon Street Station.

" Well, I really don't know what to make of Mrs. Wilfley,
and that's a fact," she replied. " She had the nerve to ask me
to take eight shillings a week, when I've been lifting twelve.
That put my back up, I can tell you. And then she wanted me
for nothing for a month, if you please. And then she said she
wanted me to live in. And after a lot of jabber about her own
queer ways I don't even know what I've got to do for her."

They were descending the stairs to the platform, and Mr.
Gilfillan stopped, put his hand on the girl's shoulder, and turned
her round to him. People passing them were amused.

" I think you will suit Mrs. Wilfley," he said, with a curious
grin on his face. " You will be like two cats sometimes, but
she will find you useful."

"But what is it I'm to do? Take down what she says in
shorthand?"

" At times, but women are seldom in the habit of dictating.
You may have to make suggestions, run errands, cash postal
orders, and entertain people."

"Me!"

"Why not?"

"Me?"

" Precisely. Mrs. Wilfley will no doubt be glad to use any
ideas you have." He nodded to the barmaid who was looking
out over a counter on the platform.

When they were in the train, he told her that he would be
delighted to see her over at Stamford Hill some evening to meet
his sister and daughter. Minnie was interested in that daugh-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 85

l?r, bat she was afraid it would be bad manners to ask questions.
So she said she'd be very pleased if it wasn't any inconvenience
to them, and, after shaking hands with him, watched him descend
at Finsbury Park and vanish among a dense crowd of people
bound homeward to High Barnet, New Barnet, Finchley, En-
field, and beyond.

She proceeded to adjust her thoughts to the return to Maple
Avenue.

XV

WHILE his sister Minnie was standing in the Ken-
sington Stationery Emporium and High-Class
Servants' Registry Office, little Hannibal Gooderich
was sitting at a pitch-pine reversible desk in the
Trinity Road Higher Grade Board School, engaged in the study
of Art. Twenty-three other little boys were in the same busi-
ness. They constituted the Fourth Standard, and the subject
was Freehand Drawing. On an easel beside the teacher's desk
hung a book of outline figures, open at Number Six, which was
a Greek amphora. The Board School method of drawing an
amphora was simply explained on a blackboard near the easel.
You drew a centre line very lightly by repeated strokes of the
pencil. Then you looked at your neighbour's efforts and com-
pared notes in whispers. If you escaped detection, you pro-
ceeded to draw cross-lines indicating the top, the middle, and
4:he narrow waist of the base, holding your rubber in the left
hand and so making it unfit for use when most needed. Then
you began to build upon this rectilinear scaffolding an approxi-
mation of the copy on the easel. It is best to do one side first
and then bring the other as near as you can to that. If you
had looked over Hannibal's shoulder you would have seen a
shaky framework supporting a vague blob of rubbed-out pencil
marks, several finger smudges, and a moist patch in the middle
showing where Hannibal had been breathing hard. The
handles had not yet been attempted. Hannibal never did
attempt the handles of the copies. The teacher always gave
the word " Line in ! " before he had disposed of the body to
any one's satisfaction. When the order " Line in," came, you
rubbed out all you could of the scaffolding and the erratic tags
of the figure, and wetting the blacklead with your tongue, bore
down hard and hoped it would look all right.

Having done one side, Hannibal blew out his cheeks, peeped
over his neighbour's shoulder, looked at the clock, the copy, and
the teacher, and partook of a pear-drop.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 87

" You said you 'adn't got any more/' remarked his left-hand
neighbour with some bitterness.

" I ain't. Foun' it in me 'ank'chief," mumbled the artist,
squinting horribly with his head close to the paper.

" Gahn\ I can see 'em," was the retort, and Artist Number
Two twisted round to pick up his india-rubber and incidentally
take a view of Hannibal's coat pocket. The clever boy at draw-
ing in the Fourth Standard sat at the end of the form, three boys
away, and he now looked severely over the bent backs and
whispered with a virtuous indignation intended for the teacher's
ears, " Don't shake ! "

I often wonder if those clever boys have ever got enough love
from women to balance the black hatred that was handed out
to them in their adolescence.

Instantly the teacher pounced upon the inverted artist, hunt-
ing, like some Congo native, for rubber.

" What's the matter here? What 'yo' doing? Eh? Rubber?
Get on with yo' work. There's nothing to rub out yet. Who's
eating sweets? Gooderieh, stand on the form. Eh? Stand
on the form, I say ! "

Nothing loath, Hannibal relinquished the amphora, and having
swallowed the remains of the pear-drop as he raised his eyes
in wondering innocence to the teacher's face, climbed upon the
form. You can see him now, a thin-legged stocky lad of eleven,
his rather uninteresting features set in a mask of anger and
contempt towards the industrious clever creature who had com-
plained of some one shaking. It was the clever boy's custom
to finish first, and then put up his hand ostentatiously.

" Please, sir, can I line in? "

This was to inform the class that once more he had out-
stripped them in Art. The class had no objection to this. The
whole shoot of them would have seen the clever boy burnt at
the stake in a bonfire of his own drawings with loud hurrahs,
but the reason would not have been his cleverness, but his insuf-
ferable airs of superior friendliness with teacher.

"Please, sir, can I line in?" Then the teacher would come
round and lean over him fondly and a whispered discussion
would ensue, and boys farthest away would use the precious
interlude to cram comestibles into their mouths and reduce them
to invisible proportions before the teacher resumed his glare in
front

88 CASUALS OF THE SEA

This time the monumental figure on the form caught the
teacher's eye as he turned to give the order.

" Sit down and get on with yo' work, Gooderich. Line in
now."

And with much scuffling of india-rubber, much hitching into
new positions, much rapping of pencils against teeth as they
gazed, open-mouthed, at the snug perfection of the copy and
their own ghastly travesties of it, twenty-four little boys began
to " line in."

Hannibal had yet another misfortune before the lesson fin-
ished. The teacher was passing behind him with that pecul-
iarly obnoxious way teachers have, shuffling along side-ways to
avoid collision with the artists who drew with their books at an
angle. Hannibal was perspiring with his lining-in efforts. A
partly-dissolved pear-drop lay on his tongue. The teacher
leaned over benignantly to see what strange forms Hannibal had
been evolving, and even condescended to flick a crumb of rub-
ber from one corner. Several other crumbs lay about, and Han-
nibal, anxious to assist the teacher in the good work, tried to
blow them away. The elusive pear-drop only too readily slipped
from its moorings, shot out upon the paper, and bounded into
space.

Tableau !

" Give them to me."

With agony in his heart Hannibal produced a sticky bag of
pear-drops. The teacher looked at them with a grimace and
pointed to his desk.

" Put them on there and go and stand in the corner."

Strange to state, Hannibal Gooderich had no objection to
standing in the corner. It provided him with a quiet spot in
which he could take out his hatred of clever boys who could
draw, and unfolding it, so to speak, examine it at leisure, adding
fresh touches to the vision, devising new humiliations for the
intellectuals of Trinity Road. He had no animus against the
teacher. He, poor man, was paid to be a tyrant and a bully,
and at half-past four his dominion ended for the day. Never
having heard of a life without school, save in the frankly im-
possible careers of Frank Read's heroes, Hannibal supposed the
teacher to be an unavoidable adjunct to terrestrial existence.
But clever boys had no such justification. They were excres-
cences, freaks, abominations. Board School boys are less tol-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 89

crant than any of " exceptional ability." Many of those who
possess it are not slow to disparage it. One boy who had won
a scholarship of twenty pounds a year for three years, had
worked for it under the impression that a munificent County
Council was to hand him each year twenty pounds in cash to
spend as he liked. His horror, when he realised that it meant
more education, was only equalled by that of his parents, who
immediately removed him from the clutches of the school au-
thorities and placed him in Everard's Livery and Bait Stables,
in Whitehart Lane. Hannibal used to hear of him, and see
him too sometimes, astride of one horse and leading another,
wearing breeches inconceivably tight at the knees and roomy
at the hips, soft gaiters, and little black-and-white striped col-
lars of india-rubber. What happiness! Hannibal and many
others immured in the Trinity Road dungeons used to think of
that radiant being as one already in paradise, and modelled their
own dreams of future bliss upon his legendary exploits.

Hannibal had not long stood meditating in the corner when
a hum of excitement communicated itself to the class. The
Third Standard was on the move, the Fifth was to be heard
tramping overhead, the Sixth, Seventh, and ex-Seventh were
forming up against the great curtains that divided the room, and
the head master came hurrying in with a baton in his hand (a
"pointer" Hannibal called it), and conversed rapidly and in-
tensely with the Fourth Standard master.

A rehearsal of the operetta was impending.

Lest the authorities should, however improbably, insert into
the curriculum of the school some familiar and useful study,
the teachers of the school, incited by a new head master who
was extraordinarily keen on music, had formed the project of
producing at the Assembly Hall an entirely new and original
two-act operetta entitled A Life on the Ocean Blue. By cur-
tailing the arithmetic and abolishing (temporarily) the reading
classes, sufficient time was obtained to make a daily rehearsal
practicable. This took place in a large room upstairs at the end
of the day, and the romantic pseudo-Italian music effectually
erased from the minds of the singers any ideas they may have
intercepted during the day.

Hannibal being bidden to return to his place and put his
things away, the whole class stood to attention, left-turned,
marked- time, right- wheeled, forwarded, left-right, left-right, up-

90 CASUALS OF THE SEA

stairs, colliding with the Third Standard in the act of deploying
to their accustomed seats by the windows, and finally subsided
into the forms by the geological specimen case. The upper
standards followed, occupying the centre, headed by the four
illustrious creatures who had been selected, after heart-break-
ing failures, to support the solo parts. Boy after boy had been
haled to the piano and given a test-sheet of Tonic Sol-fa hier-
oglyphics to interpret. Even Hannibal had been tried, and had
excited considerable local interest by being unable to utter a
single sound.

" Sing Boh" said the teacher, and struck the lower C.

Hannibal opened his mouth, but without result.

" Do you hear me? Sing D 0 H! "

No sound, Hannibal standing strained and fish-like, with his
mouth open. The teacher gave him a shove, the head master
called the next victim, and Hannibal retired, disgraced and ter-
ribly relieved, to his place. That was a month ago, and the daily
practice had hammered something like harmony into the choruses,
but the teachers were doubtless correct in giving themselves an-
other three months in which to make the production perfect.

Music is an art so generally diffused, so catholic in intention,
that even Board School boys regard musical folk without much
misgiving. The four illustrious creatures who sustained the
parts of the Captain, the Mate, and the two passengers en route
to a desert island, were not, so it happened, clever-dicks. They
sang naturally well, and the solicitude of the teachers drove them
to still higher accomplishments. But the great thing in their
favour was that, willy-nilly, their performances gave pleasure.
The clever boy who triumphed in German or Euclid, the egregious
genius who had whispered " Don't shake " that afternoon, or
the intellectual freak who swept the board at essay writing, —
what did all their cleverness amount to? Less than nothing.
But the singers gave pleasure. They had a right to be superior
if they wanted to. To a certain extent the rank and file wouldn't
have minded if they could sing too. And when the day came,
the great day at the Assembly Hall, they all mustered and
joined in the cheering and felt very proud of the performers in-
deed.

Hannibal piped away all right in unison with a hundred and
fifty other voices, and amused himself by singing what was
known as " alto." Hannibal's trouble with treble was that every

CASUALS OF THE SEA 91

now and then the notes soared out of range. If he descended
an octave the lower notes bumped against his diaphragm. The
" alto " which lie patronised was an ingenious method of bal-
ancing the harmony, and giving body to the volume of sound.
Where the treble note was high Hannibal sang low, where the
treble descended in the scale, up went Hannibal to lah and tee,
and it was a rigid rule that if you sang " alto " you had to
finish on a rather flat fah or lah, while the trebles were pinned
quivering on their final doh. The effect was very pleasing to
the singer. Strangely enough to Hannibal, the head master and
the teacher who played the piano made periodical raids on boys
whom they suspected of this apparently harmless practice. In-
deed, four had once been " smelled out " and placed in front of
a blackboard with a song written on it, and they had been com-
pelled to plough right through it again and again. Which made
Hannibal very circumspect. He had in fact perfected a habit of
moving his lips, and emitting a minimum of sound, for woe be-
tide you if they caught you not singing.

This afternoon Hannibal was fortunate in having an end seat
close to the bevelled plate-glass doors of a geological specimen
case. Away on his left across the room the sun blazed through
yellow blinds, and Hannibal, leaning back in his seat against
the desk behind (two of the illustrious ones were singing a duet),
moved his head to and fro and up and down in a curious way.
This is one of the points where Hannibal slipped off the smooth
and shining platform of commonplace accountability. He was
imagining a vain thing, but a very comical one in his opinion.
By moving his head in various odd ways, he made the distorted
image of the head master beating time take on a multiplicity of
shapes each more horrid than the last. There he was in that
narrow bevel of the glass, waving, leaping, swelling, thinning,
vanishing, looming, now all nose, now no nose at all, now a super-
cilious, long-faced saint, now a squat clawing Quasimodo, now a
pallid angel in a prismatic fire-rimmed heaven, now a devil in a
bright blue hell. It was an absorbing game. . . .

In the tolemn hours of duty
Out alone upon the deep,

sang the Mate with considerable feeling, seeing he was only thir-
teen years old, and

92 CASUALS OF THE SEA

When the stars show forth their beauty,
And the miyhty world's asleep!

added the Skipper, which is just what a skipper would sing to
his mate on a fine tropical night. And, just to show how in-
significant shipowners and underwriters really are, the two gal-
lant young officers carolled together:

Then our thouyhts fly swift to Enyland

O'er the wide blue realms of space,
In some corner of the Homeland

Find a welcome res tiny -place.

And the ship apparently was left to her own devices, which ac-
counts for the collision with a desert island and the ensuing
second Act.

Hannibal, engaged in the quest of the absolute in the bev-
elled edge of the glass, took but little interest in the duet. Like
the others, he had no tradition of the sea in his family to in-
duce any interest in nautical things. Like them and all other
Board School boys, he knew no English history, and very little
geography.

He had never seen the sea.

But he had seen, in a vague and desultory way, that illimit-
able ocean of unconscious Being in which he and all things else
swam with half-blind staring eyes. In this ocean were neither
teachers nor boys, neither mother nor father nor brother nor
sister, only Shapes, while he himself moved silently among them
a strained, thinking Eye. His voyages in this mysterious me-
dium had to be conducted with considerable circumspection, for
the people in the Real World, the active and articulate pro-
totypes of those same Shapes, were " dead against it." His fa-
ther would chuck his chin sharply if he found him sitting in a
study, and the pain of a bitten tongue, Hannibal found, was
agonising. The teachers, arch enemies of the Ideal, thwacked
him with unresilient pointers, banged him with fact-choked
books, and Hannibal would awake, sore and chagrined, stranded
on the stony beach of the Actual.

But since the rehearsal of the operetta, he had discovered that
by the aid of music could he most easily slant away into that al-
luring condition which I have tried to describe. Probably the
identity of matter and form in music served as a sort of pier
from which he could slip without effort into the subconscious

CASUALS OF THE SEA 93

world. I don't know. The psychology of reflective children is
more complicated, I believe, than it appears.

As the music went on, as the duet was rehearsed again and
again, and the throats of the illustrious tenor Mate and alto
Skipper grew drier and drier, Hannibal's interest in the gyrat-
ing image of the head master became more tenuous, and his
mind sank deeper and deeper into its trance. He found him-
self observing with a detached and cynical complacency the
movements of those intimate shapes, his Family. They swam in
and out of his visual range, his mother — what an extraordinary
creature his mother was down here! — his father and Bert
and Minnie. Even in this mysterious region of silent Shapes,
Minnie was sedate and terrifying. She was rising all the time:
each time Hannibal winked she still seemed to rise, ' a pink
shadow. Bert moved also, but his movements were spasmodic,
like a wasp on the *wing. His father moved from time to time,
turning over and over in a curiously helpless way, yet manag-
ing to avoid his wife, who was continually floating towards him.
This happened so often that Hannibal grew interested. Why
was his father moving like that? And his mother? It was like
trying to clutch something that floated immersed in water, that
movement of his mother. As you clutch, the thing swims away
with the motion of your hnnd. So moved his father, clumsily
and without poise, a volitionlcss film.

The crash of the final chorus failed to arouse Hannibal fully.
The entire school rose to its feet with the inevitable scuffles and
kicks. The piano thundered the prelude, and then.

The sea, the sea, the stately sea
The sailor's joy will ever bee — eel
The sailor's joy will ever bee — eel

Yet the boy sat, his back hard against the desk behind, en-
tranced. He watched the Shape of his mother clutching, he
watched the elusive thing he called his father evade and yet again
evade that frantic embrace, and then — vanish.

With three quick strides the head master was at his side and
raining down blows on his back, and he sprang up amazed. The
chorus swept on — only a few boys could see what all the trouble
was about. The head master pointed to the open space by the
piano, and Hannibal took up his position there.

The sea, the sea . . . the stately seal
The sailor's joy will ev — er bee — eel

94 CASUALS OF THE SEA

While the school was marching out squad by squad, the head
master conferred, with some indignation, with the teacher who
had been playing the piano and who therefore had missed the
incident.

" Disgusting, 'pon my word ! — Actually ! — Asleep ! — Public
Spirit — wretched little shuffler ! " And so on.

Hannibal, with downcast eyes, remarked that he was not
asleep.

" Oh, indeed, and what were you doing then ? "

" Thinkin', sir," he replied, and the collected teachers guf-
fawed, looking into their straw hats before putting them on. It
was a joke.

" Go on, get out of it, you shuffler ! " And Hannibal was
kicked gently out of the way. He ran down the stairs, snatched
his cap and satchel and made across the common to the Obelisk.

It must not be supposed that Hannibal, ignorant of history
and geography, had no knowledge of phenomena at all. On the
contrary, his observation lessons had included birth, death, and
corruption, the saving of life and the planting of a tree. Yet
so chaotic was the social fabric in which he was immeshed that
no one of his teachers or parents considered these things as in
any way important. u Half-sharp " the cockatoo voiced Lanca-
shire teacher called him, " balmy little hid " according to Bert.
But I myself am of a different opinion. That day when Hanni-
bal stood rapt by the Obelisk cattle trough and watched Ike
McGillies, the black-haired Irish boy, drown a starling, counting
the bubbles of air as they rose; the day when a dozen or so of
them, coming through the fields by Palace Gates Station, saw
a mare in the throes of premature delivery; the ghastly discov-
ery, in a ditch by Littler's Pond, of a maggoty dog, and subse-
quently the skeleton; the gallant theft of a wee black kitten
from a brutal vendor of crockery; the transporting of a horse-
chestnut just bursting into life from a dung-hill to the back gar-
den : — all these things seem to me of importance in the growth
of a human soul. Life and death, the warm fur of the kitten
against his check and the clammy horror of the dead terrier,
these things little Hannibal had known even then, and they
seemed to him to have some relation to that strange mood where
swam the dim shapes of people and things. . . .

And yet he was regarded as a shuffler, a witless incubus, an un-
desirable, a cypher.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 95

Clear of houses, he took his way along the road to which
Queen Bess and her Stile gave a distinctive name in the days
when Verulamium was still a noble patrimony. Here on the left
the boy paused by an old farmhouse, a decrepit building half-
hidden by untidy trees, and flanked by ruined sheds. A vestige
of the rural past, it stood there among its burning heaps of
manure, backed by a great railway, fronted by a macadamed
road, squeezed in between a brick-field and sewage farm. Han-
nibal paused on his homeward way to peer among the branches,
— the house always seemed dead, save for noises in the yard,
and a rusty harrow by the gate made it mournful. Who lived
there? Hannibal had been born and brought up within a half-
mile of it, yet he knew nothing of that lonely farmer. Such
was the spirit of the place, for at the bottom of the little hill
where ran a brook, the brick houses began, and with brick houses
the instinct of Locality becomes atrophied. In self-defence one
is not too curious who lives next door. Hannibal had more
than once been surprised to find the house next or next but one
suddenly empty in the morning, the children he had played with
vanished, and his mother's door besieged by bilked tradesmen
with, sometimes, a non-committal policeman. Only Mrs. Gay-
nor was always there, observant at the window, smiling.

The sight of a policeman holding the Inspector's horse out-
side the red-brick station induced a fresh line of thought in Han-
nibal's mind. Why did they wear blue? Soldiers wore red in
those days. Red, white, and blue, eh? Who ought to wear
white? Angels, perhaps?

Balmy little kid !

XVI

OF Mr. Gooderich himself, a word or two here will in no
wise be amiss. He was a tradesman, which to the initi-
ated means a man who has served an apprenticeship
to a trade. His skill in that trade was very moderate.
He had a slow methodical manner, he was careful and con-
scientious, and thereby gained a surer reputation than was
enjoyed my men of greater skill and energy. This manner was
the outcome of his view of life. He was a conservative working-
man. He was a faithful and reliable member of the " Mais/'
which is the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and he set
his face like flint against the slightest broadening of its basis
or the most trifling extension of its powers. He was interested
in racing and, as football grew into the national life, he, like
many Conservatives, bought the Morning Leader (only they
called it differently) for that journal's excellent reports of the
game. But I doubt if he ever read the political articles. His
conservatism was not of that sort. It was fixed, steadfast,
founded on a rock, the rock of obstinacy. He saw things hap-
pening, yet he lacked intelligence to infer the inevitable results.
Like the pike in the aquarium, he struck his head again and
again against the invisible sheet of glass, yet never connected the
glass and the blow in thought. No, his conservatism needed
more than a leading article to pierce it. " Radical Fudge " was
his placid comment on views more porous and ductile than his
own. I think " the Empire " made him feel at times, because
he once talked of " goin' out " to the Colonies. But the thought
of " Or Inglan' " which is the obverse of the Imperial medal,
held him to his vice at McMuirland's and the book-maker at the
corner of Red-cross Street.

He was temperate, kindly in a fatuous way to his children,
just to his wife while in employ, truthful in an unintelligent
fashion, yet with all this he gave me an impression of despair.
He could not move with the times. He presented a spectacle,
even in his early married days, of inarticulate protest against
a world that was moving, in spite of him, from vestries to
municipalities, from private firms to syndicates, from thousands

96

CASUALS OF THE SEA 97

to millions, from muddlers to men. He attributed all the fail-
ures of the " Mais " to their lack of trust in the masters. He
loved dogs, and he had much of the faithful dog's nature. He
would lick the hand that smote him. He was an improver when
the men " went out " in the Ferry Road, and he made the one
passionate exhibition of his life when he rose amid cheers and
jeers to denounce the calling out of the apprentices who had
taken the men's places in the yard, and so had defeated the
very end for which he fought. It was brutal and cruel, he
shouted, to spoil those lads' career in a grown-man's quarrel.
And you couldn't make him see his folly. He was Pym, Hamp-
den, Hasclrig, Hollis, and Strode all rolled into one that freez-
ing, frenzied afternoon. And when he had carried the day, he
went back to his obscurity and never again emerged. A rather
cantankerous man, if you were a person with growing pains in
your head.

He remained year after year at the bench, while younger
men raced past him, perfectly content in the sphere in which
it had pleased God to put him. He believed in God just as he
had his superstitions about the ace, number seventeen, and the
power of Tottenham Hotspurs to lift the Cup. He was one
of those men who would have made admirable conservative
licenced victuallers, if the God they respect so highly had
bestowed a small capital upon them. I can see him, comfort-
ably established at Wejrmouth, or Somewhcre-on-Sca, owning one
or two blocks of slum property off Jubilee Street (the tenants
hailing from Lithuania, Courland, and Esthonia), reading the
Daily Telegraph, temperately zealous in charitable affairs, yet
fearful of pauperising," which he understood to be the mean-
ing of * panem et circenses" an increasingly portly patriot,
recommending young men to join the army or " go out " to South
Africa, a prosperous and valuable burgess. Now and again, I
imagine, he himself had had a glimpse of this Arcady, this tavern
by the sea (forty minutes from London, frequent trains), and
had made furtive efforts to acquire a certain capital. He cer-
tainly lost a considerable sum on the favourite, that terrible year
when Jeddah won the Derby. He was at his bench, as usual,
when old Hack, who had been using his privilege as messenger
to converse with the paper-man at the corner of Goswell Road,
sidled past him and murmured " Suffcrin' Moses! A renk aht-
sider, Jack. Jeddcr — never 'eard o' the 'orse afore ! " Good-

98 CASUALS OF THE SEA

erich hung his head over his job. And his wife was pinched for
some weeks for money.

At another time, heated to a dull glow by stories circu-
lating in the shops concerning the possibilities of building soci-
eties, and the phenomenal success of a former shopmate, he had
formed a resolution to save. Even his wife had grown a little
excited about it, 'Erbcrt being about to save; and had been
damped by the American woman's remark, " Before you can
save, you must have something to save." They found that
remark true enough, and 'Erbert resumed losing half a dollar on
a horse every Saturday, and applauding the 'Spurs when they
pushed a football through the thorax of every other team in the
Southern League. And then a penny- weekly offered five hundred
a year and a freehold cottage to the person who could win a word-
competition, and the first instalment seemed so easy that the
sky was rosy with hope and the 'Spurs retreated to the back-
ground for a while. But they were soon back again, and the
prize went to some one in Van Diemen's Land. . . .

And in the meantime, while he was busy with these fiddling
things, the world moved on. Little by little the work on which
he had spent his time was transferred to automatic machines
made in Germany and America, great technological institutions
arose in the Metropolis from whose doors poured every year
swarms of young men pale from night-study, qualified to deal
with the newer methods and later mechanism. Everywhere was
being preached the gospel of Efficiency. New managers erected
glass observation boxes in the very shop where he worked, handed
him explanatory literature anent new systems of working,
whereby he might earn more money. But Gooderich never earned
more money, rather less, for the new system expected quicker
work, quicker calculations of time taken and fractions of pence.
He resented the new-fangled time-keeping. He resented every-
thing new. Everywhere now were young men. " Too old at
forty " began to reverberate in the Press. Gooderich was startled,
looked at himself in the glass. Something must be done. He
must make a definite effort to get out of the rut. Things could
not go on like this. For awhile there was another dull glow.

The next day he had purchased a bottle of hair-dye.

Mr. Gooderich was at home when his daughter entered and
hung up her hat and jacket. He stood in his shirt-sleeves by
the mantelpiece of the front room filling his pouch from the

CASUALS OF THE SEA 99

shag-box. His head was turned over his right shoulder in the
direction of his wife. They had been discussing her, apparently.
Mr. Gooderich was saying dogmatically:

" Give 'er 'cr 'ead and she'll soon get winded." Minnie set
her face in a mask and entered the room, eyes downcast, one
hand patting her hair as though she had been away but a few
moments.

" 'Ullo ! " said her father, screwing his head a little farther
round. "Got the bag, I 'ear?"

" Yes, and got another job," she replied quietly, taking a
needle and thread from a cigar-box on the sidetable. Her mother
looked up quickly and watched her repairing a small rent in her
skirt.

"Really?"

" Really, all right."

"What sort o' job?" asked her father suspiciously.

It is one of the characteristics of these people to doubt every
word you say.

" Shorthand."

"In the City?"

" Yes."

" Didn't know you could write it."

" I shouldn't like to make a list of all the things you don't
know about me, father," she answered, bending all her atten-
tion to the repair of the rent. Mr. Gooderich regarded the
top of his daughter's head. Mrs. Gooderich lifted her hand
in alarm.

"Oh," he remarked at length. "And whose fault is that?"

" Yours, I should think. You never ask."

"If that's the way you talk to your boss, I don't wonder
you got the bag. Course, I'm only your father, so I s'pose it
don't matter. So long's you keep yourself, you can please your-
self." He turned to get his coat.

" That's all right," said Minnie, though whether she referred
to the rent or her father's words nobody ever knew. She put
the needle and thread away and went out of the room. She
heard her father in the hall, the striking of the match, the
sound of her mother's voice, too low to distinguish. And then
her father.

" Not me! You brought 'er up, didn't you? Well then, bring
her down. She flics too 'igh for me. She's yours."

100 CASUALS OF THE SEA

And he went out and shut the door behind him. Minnie
heard her mother mounting the stairs.

" You mustn't mind your father, child, he's worried to death,"
began Mrs. Gooderich. " He don't mean 'alf he says."

" He means very little then," commented Minnie. " What's
he worried about ? "

" His job. He's had several short weeks, and there's no new
engines layin' down, he says, and thinks they may pay him
off."

" Well, there's other shops."

" Jobs aren't so easy got, after you're fifty," replied her
mother. "What's this job you've got?"

" A lady author wants an assistant, or something like that.
Don't ask me whether it'll be any good. I'm not sure myself
yet. I'll try it and see."

" Well, that's a nice way to talk. What's the wages? "

" Twelve, same as before. I beat her up to that anyway.
Trust me, mother. Your own little girlie can look after herself."

Mrs. Gooderich looked distressed.

" Where're you goin'?" she asked, for Minnie was arranging
her hair after a wash.

" Mrs. Gaynor's. She put me on to this job, so I must run
in and tell her about it. Shan't be long."

Going downstairs in the dark Minnie almost fell over some
obstacle on the bottom step.

"What's that? What 'you doing there, Hanny?"

" Nothin'."

Minnie fetched some matches and lit the hall lamp. Hannibal,
seated on the stair, was tying a piece of twine round the neck
of a jam-pot; a piece of bamboo lay beside him.

" Fishin' ? " Minnie was in a good humour.

" Um," responded the boy.

" A lot you catch ! " observed his sister, and went out into the
dusk. Hannibal made a face.

The string adjusted, he scrambled to his feet, grabbed his
rod and followed her through the door. His mother, close
behind, watched him scuttling away down the road into the
obscurity of Walker's Woods. Mrs. Gooderich sighed. Do her
duty as she might, she seemed unable to hold either the fear or
the affection of her children. They just took no notice. There

CASUALS OF THE SEA 101

was Minnie now, away chatting with a neighbour instead of con-
fiding in her own mother.

Mrs. Gooderich stood at the gate for a few minutes in deep
thought, and then decided to " run in " herself to Mrs. Gaynor's
and assist in the discussion ! Closing the door gently until it was
almost latched, she went along to the next house but one, and
immediately beheld her daughter and Mrs. Gaynor sitting in the
uncurtained room, their faces illumined by a gas-jet with an opal
globe. Gas-stoves had come in then, but the incandescent mantle
lav in the future. And this clear and distinct scene, visible to all
who went along Maple Avenue, disturbed Mrs. Gooderich very
much. She had an instinctive horror of this sort of publicity.
No matter how torrid the weather, Mrs. Gooderich would not
drink even a cup of tea in her back garden, — the neighbours
might see. As for taking a chair and sitting in the front room
with no curtains and a blazing light, it was " strange," and she
had spent a good part of her intellectual existence and energy
in avoiding anything strange.

So she hurried up Mrs. Gaynor's tiled path as quickly as she
could and tapped at the door. And immediately Mrs. Gaynor,
aproned and hospitable, stood before her.

"Well, now, if that isn't just what I was wishing! Come
right in, Mrs. Gooderieh. We're having a nice quiet discussion."
She stooped and straightened a corner of the cocoanut matting in
the " hall-way," " so bare you wouldn't believe," Mrs. Gooderich
was wont to comment of it. They went in, and to her mother's
surprise, Minnie did not scowl at the sight of her. Mrs. Gaynor
seemed to have the faculty of erasing scowls from people's faces.

The room, certainly in a suburban view, was scantily furnished.
The " mantel " as its owner called it, carried nothing but a plain
black marble clock, the walls were hung with two or three incon-
spicuous engravings. There was a sideboard, or in Mrs. Good-
erieh's terminology, a chiffonier with the accent on the last syl-
lable, a small table supported a small case of books, a table and
four rush-bottomed chairs, on one of which Minnie was seated.
Mrs. Gaynor herself had been sitting in a deep rocking-chair,
almost a curiosity in England in those days. She offered this to
Mrs. Gooderich, but it was too strange for her, she preferred
something with four legs. As she sat down and folded her hands,
she caught sight of little Hiram Gaynor seated on a " hassock "

102 CASUALS OF THE SEA

by the window reading a book. The boy looked up and smiled,
and Mrs. Gooderich regarded him with renewed perplexity. He
was wearing a blue jersey which came up close round his neck,
and his round, healthy little face was crowned with a shock of
tangled hair that seemed never to be combed. His knicker-
bockers were open at the knee, a style old-fashioned even then,
for straps and box-cloth finishings were in high favour for boys'
clothes. But Mrs. Gaynor did not believe in putting a child into
plate-armour, and made Hiram's knickerbockers herself out of
navy serge.

Mrs. Gooderich returned his smile, and asked him what he
was reading. He said it was a book.

" I'm sure I wish my Hanny 'ud sit down with a book in the
evening. He just runs wild. Gone fishin' now." Hiram's book
closed, and he favoured Mrs. Gooderich with a gaze of intense
interest.

" Is that so? " he asked. " Ma, can I go fishin'? "

" Oh, I s'pose you can, child. I don't reckon you'll do the
fish much damage, anyway."

" Where's he gone, Mrs. Gooderich ? Littler's ? "

" I expect so. Down the Bowes Road, anyhow. But I won-
der you allow it, Mrs. Gaynor. They only spoil their clothes."

" He's none to spoil," smiled that lady, reseating herself in
the rocking-chair.

It seemed strange to Mrs. Gooderich, allowing a child to do
what he wanted. She didn't approve of such laxity.

" Be in by eleven, child."

" Sure, Ma." And the model child vanished.

"Well, what d'you think of, this young woman now, Mrs.
Gooderich?" asked Mrs. Gaynor. "She's got a position quick
enough."

" I can't think how you're goin' to keep yourself and dress
yourself and pay rail-fare, all on twelve shillings a week? " Mrs.
Gooderich replied, looking at her daughter.

" To start," said Minnie. " I was just tellin', Mrs. Gaynor
thought, that Mrs. Wilfley wants me to live in, and she recom-
mends it."

" Live in," said her mother blankly. Living in was associated
in her mind with drapery emporiums, celibacy, and ultimate
disaster.

" Mrs. Wilfley doesn't keep a dry goods store," Mrs. Gaynor

CASUALS OF THE SEA 103

volunteered. " What she wants is a companion, I s'pose you'd
call it, some one to live with her and do little chores in connec-
tion with her profession."

" Chores ? " This again was an unfortunate word, a strange
word, a vague alarming word.

" An assistant, mother," added Minnie impatiently. " What
I want is a chance. If I don't get on with Mrs. Wilfley, I'll
get out, but anyhow I'll have a chance to look round and p'raps
see some other job with better pay. And I can't expect a big
screw until I've learned the business, can I? "

" No, I s'pose not. I do hope it'll be all right."

" It will be all right," asserted the lady in the rocking-chair.
" Mrs. Worrall is very successful in satisfying her clients."

" Why, from what she said, I thought she'd have a job too,
sometimes," remarked Minnie.

" What was that ? "

" She said her clients wanted their servants to come from
the aristocracy, and as for companions, she said they had to
belong to the aristocracy. I suppose she meant poor relations."

" She was talking sarcastic. If she recommends a young
woman, even if she hasn't any experience, Mrs. Worrall can
place her in good positions. But she would not recommend you,
because I told her something of your character in my letter."

"Why, did you tell her ?" began Mrs. Gooderieh in

dismay. A recital of Minnie's recent behaviour was tanta-
mount, in her mother's opinion, to a bad character.

" The truth," said Mrs. Gaynor simply. " But in a general
way. No details. I didn't know them."

"Did you tell her I was strong-minded?" asked the girl
maliciously.

" Surely. That was most important. If you like you can
read the letter. I always copy my letters."

Singular spectacle! A widow with business habits!

Mrs. Gaynor rose and went to a drawer in the sidetable and
took out a thick letter book. Placing a sheet of white paper
under the last letter but one she handed it to Mrs. Gooderieh.

Minnie leaned over.

This was the letter.

104 CASUALS OF THE SEA

10, Maple Avenue,

New Southgate, N.

Dear Olivia Worrall,

The young woman who bears this letter to you is a char-
acter. She has, I do believe, missed her vocation. She works in
a factory. She ought to have gone to college and entered a pro-
fession, but in this benighted country a woman doesn't even know
what a college education means.

Where could she get instruction?

She has a mighty lot to learn, I'm aware, and learn it she will,
if she gets a chance. But we mustn't expect gratitude for helping
her. She's a cast-iron image as far as other folks are concerned,
though influenced easily enough in the right way. Most girls
think they know txvice as much as their mother: this young
xvoman thinks she knows twenty times as much.

Sometimes you'd almost believe she did!

Tier young man worried her to death because he thought she
smoked. She just chased him out of the district so he'll never
come back. Her employers gave her notice last week, and here
she is planning another scheme for raising money.

She's a problem, isn't she, now?

It wouldn't do any real harm to recommend her for a rich
woman's companion, though it might ruin your business. The
rich woma?i and the young one would be the better for it. But I
don't suppose you're so rich you xvant to offend anybody yet, so
you'll just have to use your judgment.

Perhaps you'll rouse up and tell me how you're getting on. I
had a newspaper from Alvard the other day — he's still in St.
Louis — and there is a paragraph in it saying Adelaide is in
charge of the City Hospital for Children.

That girl's a real credit to her country.

Your old friend,

Ann Butterick Gay nor.

Mrs. Gooderich looked at Minnie, and Minnie looked at Mrs.
Gooderich. And then they both looked at Mrs. Gaynor, who was
looking out into the summer night.

" Well," she said, without changing her position. " Don't you
like that letter?"

" It's a funny character you've given me, Mrs. Gaynor," said
Minnie.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 105

" Mrs. Worrall's a very smart woman. I giiess she took a
pretty complete inventory of you while she was talking to you."

" It's a wonder she didn't send you packin'," said Mrs. Good-
erich, putting the letter-book on the table. " I only hope it'll
turn out all right."

" Oh, it will, sure."

Mother and daughter rose.

" She'll want some clothes," said Mrs. Gooderich.

" Let her earn them," said Mrs. Gaynor, going over to a shelf
in the corner and taking a spirit-lamp from a shelf. " Sit right
down now and I'll make some beef-tea."

By beef-tea Mrs. Gaynor meant beef-extract as made by Liebig.
In a few minutes a copper kettle was on the boil, three large cups
received their modicum of the dark, sickly-smelling compound
and the needful boiling water.

" I like this," said Minnie, taking her cup. Mrs. Gooderich
liked it too, but she did not say so. Her breakfast had been
liver and bacon and tea, her dinner stewed kidneys, her tea
bread and butter and cheap jam made of turnips and animal
jelly, and so, according to Mrs. Gaynor 's peculiar view, the
poor woman had had nothing to eat all day. Both mother and
daughter were the better for the concentrated nourishment in
the extract, and the dry biscuit, to their astonishment, was
delicious.

They began to talk afresh, discussing the situation in all its
bearings. Then they went on to Bert's prospects, Bert who was
scarcely ever at home, who was walking out with a girl now, but
who was more set than ever on joining the Army. Who was
the girl? Mrs. Gaynor enquired, and Mrs. Gooderich had to
confess that Bert was inclined to be " light." It had been Ethel
Turner, big, hoydenish Ethel Turner, of whom Mrs. Gooderich
did not approve. But occasionally other flames illuminated the
dark and taciturn soul of her elder son. Mrs. Gooderich was
not hopeful about him. She didn't want him to go for a soldier,
but lie had small prospects at the furniture shop. He was going
on sixteen now and he ought to be settled to something. But he
would talk of nothing but the Army, and his father " encouraged "
him. As if a boy had any prospects in the Army! Mention of
her husband led Mrs. Gooderich to talk of his despondent mood
caused by so many short weeks. Money got very tight when a
man drew so little. Trade was slack, very. There had been

106 CASUALS OF THE SEA

rumours of a big job from the Government, but a North-East
Coast firm had got it. Mr. Gooderich had dropped the idea of
emigrating, but he seemed to fancy work was more plentiful up
Tyneside way. She didn't want to go away. She had got used
to London. But what was the use ? — they couldn't live on
air.

Mrs. Gaynor just let her talk, and the woman's mind was
eased of its load. That Mrs. Gaynor had any troubles of her
own never entered either of her visitor's heads. Why, she
owned her house, freehold; people said she had " property," mort-
gages, shares, and such-like mysterious tokens. How could she
have any troubles. Even Mary Gooderich, simple and warped
of mind as she was, felt that the " bareness " of Mrs. Gaynor's
menage was due to her peculiar American ideas and not to pov-
erty. And Minnie, whose intellect was fifty times keener than
her mother's, knew that this quiet lady was right, and their own
way of existence was disastrously wrong. How to change it?
Well, thought the girl, there was Mrs. Wilfley for a start. Her
mother had no such ray of hope. She looked down at the green
rugs on the linoleum wood-block flooring, which was bees-waxed
until it shone, and felt nothing beyond the relief of having a soul
to speak to who seemed to understand her troubles. So she
talked, and Minnie interpolated now and then, and Mrs. Gaynor
listened with nods of comprehension, and they felt their excite-
ment calmed and the future less vague.

These two spirits, so temperamentally different, the one puz-
zled and wayworn, the other aggressively and indomitably young,
became permeated by the mysterious quality of silent human sym-
pathy, as, slowly but surely, it exercised its sublime yet invisible
functions.

" Good gracious me ! Mrs. Gaynor, it's nearly eleven o'clock.
Come on, Minnie."

" Well, I'm very glad you came in, Mrs. Gooderich. It does
me good to talk about one's troubles. I know that."

" Yes, I s'pose you've had troubles like the rest of us. Who's
that comin' in the gate? I believe it's your little boy. He is a
good child. Back before eleven."

They filed out into the hall, where a single gas jet burned
low, by the " hall stand." The door was open, and Hiram sprang

CASUALS OF THE SEA 10*

across the mat and caught hold of his mother as she was turning
out the light.

" Sakes, child, what is it now ? "

"Oh, Ma!" the boy ejaculated, and looked at Mrs. Goode-
rich as though numbed.

" What — anything happened to Hanny? " wailed Mrs. Goode-
rich, and Minnie looked sternly at the little jerseyed figure with
the tumbled hair.

" Eh ? " asked his mother.

" No, Hanny — he's all right 'nuff . He's down — down there
now. He's cryin', he is."

" What ails you, Hiram? What's he crying for? "

" There's — there's a man in the brook," stuttered the boy,
looking earnestly at his mother. "I — I reckon he's dead, I do."

" Oh ! " said Minnie, and Mrs. Gooderich moaned.

" Are you sure, Hiram ? " asked Mrs. Gaynor.

" Ask Hanny. He's there now — in the dark — cryin'."

" Mrs. Gooderich," said Mrs. Gaynor, " let Minnie go to the
police office with Hiram and we'll go on down the road. I
thought you were going to Littler's," she added, to Hiram.

" So we did. We were comin' back by Old Southgate to hear
the bells. We caught three fish, we did."

" There, go on now, and we'll put on our bonnets."

"Come on, Hiram," said Minnie, in a low, cold voice; "take
my hand." They went out and across the road where a row of
lime-trees bordered the half side-walk, and made it dark as a
tunnel. The moon had risen, and the road was a broad highway
of silver.

" Couldn't you see who it was, Hiram ? " asked Minnie, in the
same low voice. "Couldn't you see?"

" Yes," choked Hiram, nearly strangled by excitement, run-
ning, and possibly fear.

"Who was it, then?"

" Your pa," replied Hiram.

At the time of this narrative, the Apple-tree Inn, situated on
the northern side of Southgate Green, was an almost unique
example of the old-style tavern: unique, that is, in Middlesex.
For even then the craze for rebuilding had seized the breweries,
even then comfortable old bar-parlours were being swept away

108 CASlTALS OF THE SEA

and horrid new high-ceilinged edifices were taking their place.
But the " Apple," being off the great highways out of London,
and situated some two miles from a railway station, stood immune,
and, as one crossed the green, the deep ruhy red of the parlour
curtains, the tall sign swinging on a pole across the road, the big
roomy stables and old wooden horse-trough, made up a picture
comforting to man and beast, and was amply corroborated by
the hospitality dispensed within. Certainly a sane and kindly
hand had been laid upon the house: witness the snug billiard-
room at the back and the domestic jug-cubicle next the stables.
But the very heart and soul of an inn, the fountain of its per-
manence and prosperity, the parlour, remained in sedate security,
a haven of rest and refreshment for the traveller and habitue
alike.

You entered this delectable chamber through a small porch
in the lane running north-easterly to Chase Side, the inner door
opening inwards like any door at home. An oblong room it was,
with red plush seats round the outer sides, a fireplace where a
real fire crackled and flamed o' winter nights, and a small bar
communicating with the general dispensary beyond but screened
from vulgar gaze. Here perhaps some fifteen people might sit
in quiet seclusion, passing one another the glass water-jug, for
soda was not in vogue as it is now. One or two couples (en-
gaged) would be found there, he drinking gin, she port wine.
Ladies, married or engaged, generally unbent, so far as to remove
a glove, raise the veil above the eyes, and perhaps even adjust a
garter, so select and quiet was this room. Young sparks rarely
frequented it; perhaps on Saturday night (a bad night for the
select) the bar would fill with frivolity, and regular patrons
would sit, glass on knee and cigar raised upwards, somewhat
jostled, but equable of temper, waiting until the unwelcome tide
had ebbed away homeward.

The walls were panelled and so heavily varnished that the
original graining was lost in the general duskiness of the glaze,
and furnished a perfect background for the pictures, a set of
black-framed engravings, Hogarth's own, of Manage a la Mode.
They were an admirable comment, these cruelly clever drawings,
upon the actual contrasted with the visible life led by the select
and serious couples and parties who sat drinking, little finger
stuck genteelly outwards, beneath them. One could have wished
that sardonic genius to have stepped in some evening, that he

CASUALS OF THE SEA 109

might have got the one glimpse necessary for him to project
another series, brought up to date.

Who knows ? The " Apple Tree " was there before him. The
present scribe would die happy if he could but know that he
had been forestalled.

Let him not forget one incontrovertible proof of the respect-
ability of the patrons. Every one knew the pictures were worth
" a pot o' money." Yet they remained unmolested on their
hooks, and there, I hope, they remain to this day.

In order to reach the " Apple " from his home, Mr. Gooderich,
an intermittent habitue, took the road which descends with dan-
gerous steepness into the valley dividing the two parishes, crosses
the stream at the bottom and mounts with even greater precipi-
tousness the eastern hill, passing between the grey spired church
and the Chapel Fields, and debouching upon the Green. It
would be difficult to discover in any of the villages environing
London a lane more secluded by foliage and high walls or one
terminating in a more rural and charming vista. To-night, as
Mr. Gooderich passed the permanently muddy bottom and began
the stiff climb to the church, the trees overarched it so completely
that the moon might have been not yet risen, so dense and
palpable was the gloom. On either side between the walls that
form the distinctive feature of rural London stretched thickets
and woodlands amidst which you might find a number of man-
sions whose policies, for some mysterious reason, are traversed
by numerous public footpaths.

Mr. Gooderich was no longer a young man, and the climb
winded him, so that he paused a moment by the church, looked
up at the gold face of the clock, adjusted his Ingersoll, and
permitting for one brief instant the tiny grain of poetry in his
soul to diffuse and emerge, waited for the striking of the hour.
The Chapel Fields were bathed in a blinding bath of moon-
light; but he stood in the deep shade of the yew hedge in front
of the church. The chime of this church was justly celebrated
for its penetrating sweetness. Little Hannibal had discovered
this, all by himself, one wintry evening. And here was his
father protracting his arrival at the " Apple Tree " by waiting to
hear the chime.

Mr. Goodcrich's mind was sanguine with hope, and it was
characteristic of him to be short and surly with his wife at
such a time. These people — but why should I mount a pedestal,

110 CASUALS OF THE SEA

since right up through all the grades of our social fabric, men
act thus detestably to their women. Nor should I blame the
man at all since, in this particular case, since the unusual and
piquant cause of his hope has been barred to women for gen-
erations.

The fact was that Mr. Gooderich was attacked at intervals
by fits of optimism, as when he resolved to save, when he hoped
to win that five pounds a week and a house, when he dyed his
hair and worked for a foreman's berth. These fits had burned
up, flared, flickered, and gone out. He believed that pre-em-
inence in life was a matter of luck. Look at Jeddah, that rank
outsider! But this time he believed he was about to tread a
way of fortunate security. Why hadn't he thought of it before?
Well, you see, he hadn't been in the way of it much, and more-
over he hadn't got acquainted with Mr. Julius Fife. Mr. Fife
it was who, seated side by side with Mr. Gooderich in the
" Apple Tree " parlour, had discussed the hardness of times, the
decay of old England, and the transcendent advantages of being
" in " something. Why had he, Mr. Gooderich, never been " in "
anything? He was in his trade union, he retorted, but Mr. Fife
had waved that way away with a single flick of his fingers.
That was all well enough in its place, a very low place, according
to Mr. Julius Fife. Had he never thought of joining himself
with his fellow-men in one great universal brotherhood? Mr.
Gooderich never had, and it may be stated baldly that he never
would. Though he was now on his way, sanguine with hope,
to discuss with Mr. Fife the possibility and manner of his initia-
tion into Mr. Fife's Lodge, the notion of joining any fraternity
for the pious purpose of helping others never entered his head.
He had every intention, if luck favoured him, of jumping on
others and stamping their faces into the ground, if he could
improve his position thereby. Mr. Julius Fife's aspirations were
pure and undefiled, no doubt. I do not know him very well,
and he is welcome to the benefit of the doubt. But I knew Mr.
Gooderich like the back of my hand, and I can assert that he
was entirely innocent of philanthropic sentiments. The Great
Architect of the Universe would have been nonplussed to find
him a suitable job in the Temple. His talents lay in other
directions.

The deep mellow boom of the great bell thrilled through the
shining night as he stood in the shadow of the yew hedge, and

CASUALS OF THE SEA 111

the heart of the man was uplifted. And then the chime — Cling
— clang — cling — clang — cling — cling — clang — clang, was
followed by eight solemn strokes.

Mr. Gooderich made his way across Southgate Green.

He found his friend Mr. Julius Fife, a man of spare frame,
plain yet expensive raiment and neat personal habits. He was
a gentleman of the Trade, but the house over which he had
presided with considerable success had been deprived of its license
on some frivolous pretext, and Mr. Fife was a gentleman at
large until the brewer who paid him a hundred a year and a
bonus could find him another sphere for his activity. The most
salient prejudice of Mr. Fife's mind was his wolfish ferocity
towards those bigoted gentlemen who had persisted in interpret-
ing a license as a document of merely annual validity. Accord-
ing to Mr. Fife, a license was as eternally valid as a fiat from
God — indeed, had he had the duty of bearing his license, en-
graved on tables of stone, from out of the thunder of Sinai, he
would never have broken it. His mind, as I have intimated, was
warped in its attitude towards the justices, " a party of old
womeil " none of whom had any real living financial interest in
the Trade, and who actually thought three public-houses in fifty
yards of street an excessive number. Ah — h, these Radicals:
for Mr. Fife the Liberal Party had no existence. Like the Globe
newspaper, he knew only Radicals, who read " Radical Rags."
This alliterative animadversion acted as a sedative on minds like
Mr. Fife's. And it was an apparent and curious fact that the
words Trade and Union, taken apart, thrilled Mr. Fife to the
core of his being, but when coupled together these roused in his
soul a ferocity even more wolfish than did the benighted magis-
trates. Such was the person, amiable enough in exterior, who
nodded good evening to Mr. Gooderich as the latter entered the
decorous precincts of the " Apple Tree " parlour.

The community of interest which had led these two gentle-
men to fraternise was racing. Mr. Gooderich's personal ac-
quaintance with race-horses was as intimate as his knowledge of
elands and spotted lemurs, though he watched their form with a
tenacity of purpose and a fatigue of brain sufficient to carry him
successfully to the head of the Wrangler's List at Cambridge.
Mr. Fife, on the other hand, was acquainted with Newmarket.
He had, as a matter of fact, spent two years as a bar-tender
in a public-house in that very sleepy little township, and been

112 CASUALS OF THE SEA

very glad indeed to exchange its rural atmosphere for the more
garish delights of the Brompton Road. Moreover, so admir-
ably organised, so extraordinarily discreet, is every one engaged
in the racing profession, from the photographers in the High
Street to the stable-urchins in the football-field, that one may
live, even as a potman, for years in the town, and never glean
a " tip " worth twopence. But Mr. Fife did not tell his com-
panion this. He submitted tacitly to the implication that while
at Newmarket he was in the confidence of every trainer and
manager who took a brandy and soda from his hands. As for
the horses, he knew them all by sight — saw them every day.
So he did, at six in the morning, each animal so swathed and
top-coated that it might have been a Zebra for all Mr. Fife knew
to the contrary.

Starting from so felicitous a theme, the pair, during several
informal rencounters at the " Apple Tree," had pursued tlieir
way among the myriad problems which beset our modern life,
and had discovered such compatibility of temperament that Mr.
Fife had cast aside the toga of the Trade, so to speak, and
addressing Mr. Gooderich as a fellow man, bade him enter the
Mystic Portals and become a neophyte in a Lodge in which, it
was understood, in a manner too involved and subtle to transmit
to paper, Mr. Fife himself occupied a not unimportant posi-
tion.

The question was, could he raise the necessary twenty pounds.

Being actually on the top of the tide of optimism which had
been gradually overtaking him for days, and very soon flushed
with spirit, Mr. Gooderich saw no difficulties. He spoke of hav-
ing to draw on his reserve of late, work being scanty, but thought
he could manage it " very shortly."

" Well, of course, you know your own business best. Mister,
but I thought it best to mention it you — understand?" Mr.
Gooderich swallowed and nodded.

" Course, if it is any particular trouble, seeing I'm the one
who's puttin' you up to the idea, and, 'without prejudice ' " —
(here the voice of Mr. Fife flattened to a close-lipped whisper)
— " draw what you like, up to fifty, at fi' p' cent."

Mr. Gooderich fixed his eyes critically on No. 3 Mariage
a la Mode, and revolved the matter in his mind. It was a
great relief, for it removed the necessity for telling lie after lie
all to cover the naked fact that his bank account was seventeen

CASUALS OF THE SEA 113

and eightpence. He had no objection to being lent money. As
for the interest, what improvident man ever did worry his head
about interest ? And then look at the ultimate advantage. How
they all backed each other up, looked after the orphans and
widows and all that. . . . Even the King

Vague visions of a happier future floated before Mr. Goode-
rich's eyes. I have mentioned in a previous chapter his ideal
of existence, in a tavern by the sea. Something of this pos-
sessed him now — if he could only possess the substance ! It
was not impossible — he was sitting beside a man who had been
in that glorious position, who would be in it again shortly.
Through the fumes of the whisky Mr. Gooderich contemplated
happiness, a happiness which consisted almost entirely, dear
reader, in not having to work. That improved circumstances
would enable him to educate his children, buy them books and
instruments, send them abroad to become acquainted with the
civilisations of Europe, would place within his wife's reach a
respite from her abominable and ceaseless toil, give her fine rai-
ment and decent retirement — these trivialities did not obtrude
themselves upon his outlook at all.

There had come into his usually quiet eye a look of the anx-
ious ferrety sort, intended by him to indicate a knowing, worldly,
and cynical turn of mind.

By ten o'clock his optimism brooked no opposition from any-
thing. The question of security was disposed of with a laugh.
If he couldn't find security for twenty pounds — well! What
did Mr. Fife take him for?

At ten-fifteen Mr. Fife looked at a rolled-gold hunter, com-
pared it ostentatiously with the neat black clock on the chimney-
piece, clicked the lid to, put it away and reached for his stick.
He was sorry, but he had an appointment at eleven with a
brother-in-law of his — a little matter of business. He would
see Mr. Gooderich the following evening and talk it over further.
No need to rush it. Go into things bald-headed, and you get
singed! (Greater men than Julius Fife have mixed metaphors.)
Take your time and you didn't regret it. Well, was Mr. Goode-
rich going too? In the opposite direction of course. Well, goo*
night. Goo' night, Miss!

And Mr. Fife, relighting his pipe, made off in an easterly
direction towards Palmer's Green.

Mr. Gooderich paused in front of the Assembly Rooms to

114 CASUALS OF THE SEA

collect himself. He was sanguine, there was no doubt of that.
Equally undeniable was the potency of the spirit within him.
He straightened himself up, set forward westward, but did not
notice, so deep were his cogitations, that he was taking the road
through the village instead of that by the church, until the
brazen front and acetylene lights of the " Green Dragon "
recalled him to the world of sense. He went on, reflecting that
just a little ahead on the opposite was a signpost and a gate,
which led to a path across the fields — one of those fortuitous
and illogical trails I have mentioned — over the stream at the
bottom of the valley, and so out upon the East Barnet Road. It
was a fine night, a beautiful night for a sanguine man to take
a walk. It was early yet. And he passed over, sighted the gate,
made it safely, and resumed his walk and his musings.

" The intellectual power, through words and things, went
sounding on its dim and perilous way."

For Mr. Gooderich assisted his reverie by a series of dis-
jointed sentences, not always to the point, sometimes profoundly
obscure. Like some great poets, whose most impassioned moods
and loftiest flights are the most difficult to construe, so Mr.
Gooderich 's mentality, as it soared into the empyrean, became
less adapted to our common speech, and the " way " would have
seemed " dim and perilous " had there been any one near to
listen. Frequently enough he encountered lovers, but the respect-
ability which he wrapped round his soul even in drink came to
his aid and he stalked by them impeccable. And as he advanced
the sheltering trees were left behind, the path lay down across
wide misty meadows, destitute of the seclusion so dear to the
lover, and Mr. Gooderich wavered onward, a solitary man. The
cool night-wind after those potions of warm water and whisky,
did not, as many inexperienced folk imagine, allay the disorder
of the brain. It seems almost as though, when the spirit has
risen to the head, it is confirmed there by a cooler air. Moreover,
that terrible white radiance in which he moved is no friend of
sanity.

" To be — be a I'm all right, now I'm a — what a saucy

bitch that gel is! So help me Gawd! I'll tell her — phoo! —
where's the matches — her mother knows she's a — what a life !
— 'f I wasn't married I could get on, oh yes, — sh'll look ol'
fash'n'd when she knows she's a — a Mason ! — me I mean —
wimmen bob down then — whupp! dam the fence — like day-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 115

light this moon is. Where's me matches ? — now hold up, Jed-
dah ! O my Gawd, Jeddah ! " He dropped the match flaming
to the ground and stood staring into a vacancy of horror. That
day! How the name of the horse brought back that terrible
Derby! Slowly he struck another match, shaking his head.
" Fort'n o' war ! " he muttered, moving on. " Are we down-
hearted ? make anybody down-'earted, t'live wi' 'er. R — r — r!
yer little slattox! Than-gaw' you ain't mine, wi' yer chin stuck
out."

His dislike, or impatience or whatever it was, exacerbated
by alcohol, flickered tremulously from wife to daughter, from
daughter to wife. And so in a zigzag way he came to the
bottom, where the path ran into shade again, and an old tree
leaned over the stream by the little wooden bridge.

A lady and gentleman, communing after the manner of their
kind upon the mystery of elective affinities (How strange! And
I was goin' to school then. Fancy ever comin' to this:) and
possibly other astonishing aspects of their lives which they per-
ceived reflected in the stream, were leaning on the rail, he idly
cutting his initials with his knife. With some impatience they
turned on the interloper, who had paused behind them to pursue
his interminable pipe-lighting. With no loss of dignity, the gen-
tleman, outraged by this infraction of the unwritten Laws of
Love and Courtship, shut up his knife, took the lady's arm and
moved on, leaving a neatly carved R and a half-finished S (very
difficult to do an S decently) on the mossy rail. Mr. Gooderich,
wasting matches, looked after them stupidly for a moment, and
then leaned on the rail himself, glad of the support. The unmis-
takable displeasure of the pair cast a shadow over his optimism.
What had he done? He was a respectable man, goin' to join a
lodge, wasn't he? Well then, where were the matches? He
looked at his pipe, trying to capture an idea that had flitted
across his mind just now. Ah! It wanted cleaning. He ran
his hand along the weather-worn rail until a split in the wood
caught his fingers, now intertwined. They 'adn't bought the
bloomin' bridge, 'ad they? Well then. He continued to pull
abstractedly, not noticing that the split opened obliquely across
the grain. Gaw dam't, come off! He gave a wrench which
dislodged the rail at the far end, and leaning in his surprise
still more heavily upon it, it gave way and plunged him head-
long into the stream.

116 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Little Hanny and Hiram, returning stained and weed-draggled
from Littler 's Pond, came past the church and down the steep
hill, triumphant with three fish of negligible size.

Arrived at the stone bridge they began a discussion of the
huge fish to be had in this stream, and sitting on the northern
parapet they stared at the three-foot weir over which the water
was pouring with a faint musical sound.

" That's what keeps 'em down here, I guess," said Hiram,
jerking his stick towards the weir. " There ain't no fish up
there, 'cause I tried it at that little wood bridge on the path.
It's deep and got stones at the bottom, but there ain't no fish."

" There is over 'ere," said Hannibal, flinging his thumb over
his shoulder.

" You git summoned quick if you're copped."

" Um. Not 'alf." They swung their legs in unison.

" Say, Hanny, what's that comin' down there? See it? "

"I dunno. Ain't a dog, is it?"

Out on the shining whiteness of the meadow-bordered stream
beyond the trees they saw a black blob moving quickly towards
them.

" Lummy ! " said Hannibal, and Hiram echoed " Lummy ! "
and with that absurd ejaculation their feelings passed into the
region of the inexpressible. Sometimes it disappeared, that
curious blob on the shimmering whiteness of the water, some-
times paused and turned slowly on itself, caught by some invis-
ible snag, then vanished into the shadow of the trees. They
waited, trembling and voiceless, for the splash, and jumped when
they heard it, straining their eyes to pierce the darkness. Simul-
taneously they saw it, saw it with a chill at their hearts and a
crawling sensation of their skins, immediately beneath them,
turning horribly on the footing of the bridge, and slipping under
them. With a quick intake of his breath, Hiram ran across the
road, climbed the parapet and looked over the wooden fence that
rose above it. Hannibal, in a trance, followed, afraid, grating
his knees on the stones as he tried to mount beside his com-
panion. Hiram put his hand against Hanny's face and pushed
him back.

" What's up ? " Hanny whispered, looking up scared and
trembling.

Hiram slipped down and pulled up his stockings.

"It's a man." He breathed. "He's dead, I guess. I'll

CASUALS OF THE SEA 117

run an' tell Ma. You stop here, Hanny." And he ran off up
the road as hard as he could. The child looked after his friend
as though wishful to follow. A dead man! He put his knees
against the stones once again and clambered up. The full light
of the moon came strongly upon the water just there and he
saw it grounded on a sandy shoal, the hands swaying purpose-
lessly in the current, a quiet and memorable picture.

With a little cry the boy slid to the ground, and there they
found him, huddled against the wall in the darkness, one hand
pressed on the stones, the other covering his face.

XVII

MRS. WILFLEY, when she heard of the domestic be-
reavement from Minnie herself, sprang at the
opportunity like a lioness upon her prey. Minnie,
somewhat fatigued by the emotional stress of the
previous night, and rendered a little uncertain of herself by an
encounter with the young man in the coal-agent's office, was
borne down, swept off her feet and carried away by a torrent of
gush unparalleled even in Clifford's Inn. When it subsided
she found herself, limp and bewildered, on the Chesterfield by
the window, sniffing a handkerchief drenched in Florida-water
and listening to Mrs. Wilfley's plans for the future.

These plans were in the main altruistic. In spite of her frail
health and an urgent request from a northern editor to write a
series of articles on the moral tone of the town, Mrs. Wilfley
was resolved to interest herself in the welfare of the Gooderich
family. She had done this sort of thing before, and knew that
swiftness of initiative was imperative if some one else were
not to prevent her. Of course nothing could be done publicly
until the funeral, but much might be accomplished privately, so
that at the psychological moment, a phrase dear to her, she
might burst forth in the very forefront of the movement as hon-
our ary secretary of a committee of prominent people, including
one or two local people, to arrange a grand concert in aid of
such a deserving case. Mrs. Wilfley placed much reliance on
her influence with the local religious life: her articles, she had
reason to believe, were read omnivorously in Nonconformist cir-
cles. Possibly a lecture by her on " Slum Life " or "A Flower-
Girl's Tragedy " might be a further contribution.

All this, as it became clear to Minnie from Mrs. Wilfley's ex-
planation, was profoundly distasteful. She realised that neither
she nor her family had the slightest claim upon the neighbour-
hood. Her father had not been a member of any club or church,
they had done nothing individually or collectively to identify
themselves with the community, they had merely lived rather

118

CASUALS OF THE SEA 119

meanly and obscurely amidst a number of other mean and ob-
scure families. Moreover, she had the nobility of soul which
is libellously miscalled " proper pride " ; she resented the inter-
ference of strangers in her affairs. She was not a good girl,
she was not a " nice girl," she went, eventually, far from the
paths df virtue; but at least she stood on her own feet; she
took the wages of sin, not the spongings of the pious. But Mrs.
Wilfley considered Minnie's distaste not at all. She was re-
solved to take an interest in the case, and she did. She told
Minnie to go home and look after her mother and leave the
matter entirely in her hands. Which Minnie was willing to do,
only — here she sat up and faced her benefactress — was she to
start on her new work?

" Oh, certainly," chanted Mrs. Wilfley. " My dear girl, what
can you think of me? I will send you a cheque for a month's
salary at once. Have I the address? Yes; well, I will for-
ward it at once."

Nothing could be more generous, more charming.

When Minnie was gone, Mrs. Wilfley, who had the constitu-
tion of a cart-horse when she found it convenient, sat down and
did several hours' hard work. Then she went downstairs to a
publisher on the ground floor, and borrowing his telephone (who
can refuse a lady?) held communication with Mrs. Worrall,
Mr. Anthony Gilfillan, and the secretary of a dramatic employ-
ment bureau. Mrs. Worrall referred her dear friend to Mrs.
Gaynor, Mr. Gilfillan, arguing company-law with a suspicious
solicitor, professed himself charmed to assist Mrs. Wilfley, and
begged to be placed on the committee as he lived in the neigh-
bourhood, and the secretary of the dramatic employment bureau
ran over a list of names on his desk which, he believed, would
suit such a concert as Mrs. Wilfley suggested, and hoped to hear
further shortly. Terms, he added, as usual, five per cent, com-
mittee to pay all travelling expenses. These matters adjusted,
the lady thanked the publisher prettily, ascended to her own
flat again, and wrote a tactful letter to Mrs. Gaynor. She knew,
she said, from what their mutual friend Mrs. Worrall had hinted,
that Mrs. Gaynor would prove a valuable ally in this projected
charity, and begged Mrs. Gaynor to assist her by suggesting a
suitable prominent local resident as president and chairman.
Hoping for the pleasure of a meeting shortly, she begged to
remain, etc

120 CASUALS OF THE SEA

To this Mrs. Gaynor replied briefly, saying that while quite
unfitted for any active participation in the proposed affair, she
had no hesitation in advising Mrs. Wilfley to approach Colonel
Corinth-Squires, of Chits-hill Place, to assume the chairmanship,
he being quite the proper person and well able to give solid finan-
cial support as well as social prestige. And she begged to re-
main, etc.

And so, almost before the coroner had packed his black bag,
the preliminaries had been settled, the parties had been ap-
proached, and the musical artistes had had word of a possible
engagement in North London.

Colonel Corinth-Squires, on receipt of a letter from a total
stranger, remembered with a start that he had promised to speak
to a friend commanding the Wessex Fusiliers concerning the
lad who had so dramatically stated his intention to be a soldier.

He had made a note of it at the time, but one thing and an-
other had caused the affair to slip from memory. Now the
name Gooderich recalled the whole matter. While writing at
once to Casterbridge Depot, his daughter came in and expressed
surprise that the authoress, Olga Wilfley, should be writing to
her father. The Colonel was gratified. Even he had heard of
the book The Licencees of Love, and he delighted his daughter
by permitting her to answer Mrs. Wilfley favourably, adding an
invitation to dinner to enable them to discuss the whole proposi-
tion.

" As a matter of fact," said the Colonel, half to himself and
half to his daughter as she sat writing her note, " as a matter of
fact, it's quite unnecessary to use any influence to get a lad into
the Army except physical force, which will never happen in
this wretched country. On the other hand, if I send him to
Casterbridge, and he thinks some one is interested in his good
behaviour, he will probably stick to his work and turn out well.
If I don't, he may not go into the Army at all, and become a
counter-jumper or a — a something useless." Miss Corinth-
Squires carefully ignored her father's cogitations and bent all
her attention to the writing of the note. She was not a good
penwoman, and the letter, when written, resembled the horo-
scopes sold by Hindoo fortune-tellers in Bombay. She had,
moreover, a difficulty in striking just that chord of dignity, pat-
ronage, and cordiality which she felt would be acceptable to such
a distinguished woman as Mrs. Olga Wilfley. She was really

CASUALS OF THE SEA 121

grateful to dear Dad for giving her this chance to overtop the
Barlows, the Revingtons, and even the Plunket-Downes with
their insufferable Newnham daughter who read Ostrovsky in the
original.

When Mrs. Wilfley received the note, she dismissed from her
mind the notion that it was written in an Oriental language, and
at once fell upon its exegesis. She knew by experience the de-
plorable state of education among the upper classes. Perhaps
this word is not sufficiently strong. Exegesis, as Doctor John
Browne kindly explains to us non-classical folks, means bringing
out of a passage all there is in it. Mrs. Wilfley did this, but I
think she also followed that brilliant school of commentators
and art critics who read into a work vastly more than the original
Father or Master ever dreamed of. Certainly Miss Carolyn
Corinth-Squires would have been agreeably tickled had she
known how far-reaching Mrs. Wilfley imagined the results of
this encounter to extend. But Miss Corinth-Squires was not a
public person. She had never reflected on the fact that all fame
is built up of innumerable microscopic transmitted opinions, of
myriads of inconceivably small enthusiasms which, like coral
insects, live out a brief life among their fellow specks and die,
leaving a tiny hollow shell of sounding reputation, and form,
with the coming of the years, a reef round which the breakers
roar and on which many a cock-boat, useful in itself, is dashed
to atoms. I do not say that Mrs. Wilfley ran this thought to
earth in exactly the same way as I have done, but she was
keenly conscious of the fact and welcomed any means of extend-
ing its application to herself. Both ladies, indeed, had so much
to occupy their immediate deliberations that the bereaved fam-
ily almost dropped out of memory altogether. Not so the
Colonel. He had told the story at White's with approval, the
story of that masterly manoeuvre on Trinity Green, that Napole-
onic stroke of genius of the feint, the ambush, the final furious
melee. Give the boy a five-poun' note and pay his fare to Cas-
tcrbridge, eh? By George, it had done him good when that
young ruffian had stuttered out " Soldier, sir," all among his
mates in the class. Good stuff there!

Bert appeared.

" Still o' the same mind, eh?"

" Yessir," replied Bert.

" That's good, that's good. Well, I'll give you a note to the

122 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Colonel at Casterbridge — here it is — and here's a trifle to help
the mother. Oh, that's all right, my lad. Stick in and step
smartly. Make a man of you in no time. Always trouble some-
where in the Empire, yo' know; may get your chance any day.
That's right, that's right. Good-bye."

And Bert, armed with his note and a small bag of movable
dunnage, made his way to Casterbridge and dropped civilian's
life and clothes forever and without regret. He was glad, he
admitted, that the inquest decided his old man " 'adn't done his-
self in," Bert having deep-laid and quite inarticulate views on
self-destruction; and he was glad to feel that he would not
be round when the grand concert came off.

For the grand concert, thanks to Mrs. Wilfley's unflagging
efforts, came off, in the Assembly Rooms, in style. She had
dined at the Corinth-Squires' and had been begged to assume
the secretaryship. That accomplished, she made many friends
among the religious denominations, secured the editor of the local
paper, engaged her artistes, contracted for the hall and printing,
did everything, in fact, in a clever and expeditious manner.
Minnie, proceeding day by day to Clifford's Inn, did most of
the clerical drudgery, it was true; but could she do less, she who
was to benefit so largely, she who had received a month's sal-
ary in advance? And it was during these days, when Mr. Gil-
fillan, as a member of the committee, called frequently to confer
with the secretary, that Minnie's nature became softer and more
pliant under his dominant personality.

The widow, addressing her bed-posts before turning out the
light, remarked:

" Tony takes an interest in the child " ; adding, as she reached
out to the switch:

** And she looks very effective in black."

XVIII

MINNIE was, however, the only one of the family who
did look effective in black. Mrs. Gooderich was not
an effective woman at the best of times, and she
supported the role of widow neither with dignity nor
composure. She was harassed, she said, with so many things.
Truly the sudden removal of the companion of so many years
was a shock; but tears? She felt that her position involved
many tears, so persistent is the hypocrisy of modern life. Mrs.
Gaynor was of no avail against the enormous weight of tradi-
tion. Her silent yet powerful personality was baffled in its at-
tempt to assuage the lachrymatory flood. Unwittingly, no
doubt, she was of too fine a type to deal with the woman, for
her patience broke down after the funeral, when the returning
cortege halted at the " Northern Star " and the mourners filled
the saloon-bar with crepe. With an indignation unexpressed in
words, but patent in her carriage, Mrs. Gaynor walked slowly
home. This adjournment was not proposed by Mrs. Gooderich,
though she thought it only the thing to do. Her husband's
sister's husband, father of Amelia, Thomas, Ethel, and John,
who bulked largely in the first carriage, was the author of the
scheme. They were all there, the builder in a small way in
Camberwell, his large languid wife, his pre-eminently respect-
able children, Amelia, Thomas, Ethel, and John, black-garbed,
quiet and interested. Little Hannibal sat opposite little Amelia;
and they two, destined in happier years to walk as sweethearts
to and fro, regarded one another with the mysterious resentment
of children. Mr. Brown himself was, as I said, a bulky man,
with a firm mouth, conventional whiskers, and a humorous blue
eye. Perhaps it was his humour that led him to call at a
licensed house for the funeral baked meats. Perhaps he fath-
omed Mrs. Gaynor's racial antipathy to gin-palaces, and de-
sired, after the manner of Gothic humourists, to emphasise the
grotesque. Perhaps he was merely conventionally anxious for
a drink, for he made no remark when she stalked away from the

123

124 CASUALS OF THE SEA

spot, and doubtless forgot her while consuming pork-pie and
stout.

He was unfeignedly pleased to hear that local people were
fixing up a concert in aid of his sister-in-law, for he held no
sentimental views of his duties towards the widow and the or-
phan. He had four growing children to feed and clothe, his
own wife was " delicate," as witness her partiality for invalid
stout and port wine, his business was small and profits pre-
carious, what could he do? He was surprised, he said, that
Herbert had not been " in " anything but his trade-union, who
had provided the funeral expenses, but he and him had never
had much truck with each other. Live an' let live was his
motto. Ah, well, we all 'ad to go some time. Any little thing
he could do, he declared, at any time, he'd only be too glad.

Minnie, watching him with mercilessly steady eyes, and igno-
rant of the high courageous humour that balanced him on his
slippery little vantage point of life, decided that it was very
little he would ever do. Which was unreasonable of the girl,
for she had no wish to be beholden to him; but she was in an
unreasonable mood all that day. The coal-agent's clerk, not
satisfied with her politely evasive answer at the station that
morning, after the tragedy, had called and asked if the occasion
might not pave the way to a reconciliation, and Mrs. Gooderich
had silently implored her daughter to be human and generous.
Almost the evil spirit in her had prompted her to say, "If you
want him, mother, you can have him — now," but she had
flinched from that viciousness and left the room with a shake
of the head. Mrs. Gaynor's defection had disturbed her too,
for she had an enormous respect for Mrs. Gaynor, a respect
which that lady would never have drawn from either Mrs. Goode-
rich or Mr. Brown, Minnie being of a finer texture, her mind
of a subtler cast. And though Mr. Anthony Gilfillan's unmis-
takable interest was softening her attitude towards life, trans-
forming her own private phantom-universe, it did not make her
any easier to live with, which proves the earthiness of Love.

So Uncle and Aunt Brown went home with cousins Amelia,
Thomas, Ethel, and John, and trouble neither the Gooderich
family nor us for some time.

Little Hannibal profited most, I imagine, from the whole
business. He had an entire new suit of black cloth, new boots,
his first bowler hat, a bath (which he needed), a hair-cut, a

CASUALS OF THE SEA 125

whole new set of ideas, and a week's holiday in which to set
them in order. I pass over his joy in playing at funerals:
that is an inhuman drollery common to most children and was
checked with the thoughtless ferocity of the average adult.
What seemed to me interesting was the nature of the reaction
from the first Terror that overwhelmed him, child that he was,
when he saw his father's face in the moonlit water, the Terror
of the unknowable. It is true that the new mood was retarded
by his mother's intermittent gusts of affection for the poor little
orphan, retarded still more by the embarrassing questions of his
schoolmates after the funeral. "Are you sorry?" they would
ask him as he stood in a ring of staring interested eyes. " Are
you sorry?" "I d'n know," he would reply, chucking a stone
unconcernedly, and the others felt they were being defrauded.
They had all, of course, been rogued of threepences and six-
pences to pay for the School Wreath, which an insane teacher
had proposed in order to gain some notoriety for himself, and
they felt dimly that in return they should have been given
some details on which to gloat, some ghoulish tale from the
House of the Dead. But when these ephemera had passed
away, little Hannibal's mind took on a yet more emphatic tinge
of reflectiveness, his thoughts moved in a closed circle round and
round the huge and shadowy enigma of human change, and
death became but one more manifestation of it. Bert had
changed, had become coarsened and redolent of tobacco, and was
about to vanish; Minnie had changed, had grown from a flinty-
eyed Medusa who petrified his adolescent gambols to a tolerant
semi-stranger, and was in the act of evanishment. Viewed in
the light of these overwhelmingly salient facts, and slowly and
clumsily excogitated, the problem of his father's high adventure
took on a similar hue of irrational change. The paraphernalia
of interment was to him an entirely irrelevant matter, as to most
children who are spared the shocking ordeal of inspecting the
coffined dead. I suppose, if you had bullied him and driven
him into a corner, you might have extracted an opinion that his
father was " in there," but this by no means invalidates the
contention that the whole business was a rather entertaining
show, ending up with a sip of port wine at the " Northern Star "
and shrimps for tea. To "become aware suddenly," in the Pa
tcrian phrase, " of the great stream of human tears falling al-
ways thro' the shadows of the world," a young soul must have a

126 CASUALS OF THE SEA

higher conductivity, a closer identity with Nature, and possibly
a clearer atmosphere, than obtained with little Hannibal. Be
that as it may, it certainly seemed as though the boy's spirit,
immersed in that illimitable ocean of the unconditioned of which
I have already spoken, had been drifted away by an invisible
yet resistless current, such as exist in our terrestrial atmos-
phere, had been carried neither high nor low, but beyond the
radius of his mother's arms. Had fate been propitious here we
might have proceeded to record the history of a genius, an
iconoclast, a seer, an artist. The materials were there, if you
consider the boy's crystal-clear vision of mind, his corporeal
swimming and full brown eye. But the fuel was slow-burning,
the flame wandered uselessly, and while the heat was to no
purpose, there was no explosion, no power. And that is the
need of the man nowadays, as of old, power. The dreamer, the
thoughtful ones need this most of all. Without it they are
peculiar, but ineffectual, sometimes also abominably sensual.
You shall see.

Here ends, therefore, this part of this book. To what good
purpose were it to proceed laboriously with the disintegration
of this family, having shown you the spiritual fact accomplished.
That they emerge later, coagulate to a certain extent, disperse
once more, and finally pass, making through Hannibal Goode-
rich, ■' a small tribute to the ascending effort " of the world,
will be manifest in the conclusion, if your patience will carry
you so far. But that a promise may be redeemed, we may
interpolate as an episode (at this time of day!) the love-story
of the girl.

END OF BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO
THE CITY

AU virtue which is impracticable
i$ tpurioiu." — Burke.

PART I

IN a few days, after Minnie had brought a wheezy, ill-
strapped dress-basket and a paper bag containing her Sun-
day hat, and taken up her quarters on a truckle bed which
was hidden during the day under a yellow cover, she de-
clared open war. In the first place, Minnie discovered with
some surprise that the companionship of Mrs. Wilfley involved
housework in all its branches, from washing dishes to cleaning
hair-brushes with cloudy ammonia. Certainly the dishes were
only breakfast dishes, and the latter task was begged from her
as a favour, but the vertical furrow in the girl's forehead deep-
ened for all that. Then again, Mrs. Wilfley was conversational
in the sense that she required some one else to be present while
she talked to herself about herself. It was not reliable in-
formation because, to tell the truth, Mrs. Wilfley knew remark-
ably little about herself, but it was an integral part of the
lady. She had dreams of a salon where she could gather about
her all her clever friends, a salon that would become famous
like those of Rambouillet and Lady Jeune. They of course
would talk, but it would be her own golden voice that would
weave them all together and make of them a shining and mem-
orable community. In the meanwhile she practised on Minnie,
a young woman whose soul, she decided, was dormant. She
had practised for some time on Anthony Gilfillan, who possessed
sufficient humour (toward women) to escape unharmed. But
Minnie's nature could not sustain without distortion such a
heavy panoply of glittering harness as Mrs. Wilfley's com-
panionship soon became. Superimposed upon the girl's as yet
unexploited ambition lay a stratum of satire, a thin layer of
eestheticism and a thick mass of marble indifference streaked
willi vivid and tangled veins of red anger and love. Of sensu-
ality you could find but little, that being found most often with
religiousness; and of the latter the most exhaustive assay de-
tected no trace. It might be wondered therefore why a woman
so emotionally destructive as Olga Wilfley should have " taken

X2U

ISO CASUALS OF THE SEA

to " the girl as she had done, and the faint-hearted investigator
might be tempted to refer the puzzle to the " attraction of oppo-
site types," and leave it at that. Such a solution, however, is
not clear enough to be strictly honest. An explanation of psy-
chological phenomena should explain, and this the above gen-
eralisation does not do. We must employ some reagent that
will precipitate the turbidity and leave the whole thing clear.
That reagent consists in the statement that Olga Wilfley and
Minnie Gooderich, though widely dissimilar in age, experience,
and emotional activity, were on exactly the same sex-plane.
Neither of them had the slightest propensity for motherhood.
In neither of them did the life-force direct the imagination to-
wards domestic fecundity and economic ease. To Mrs. Wilfley
a man was a being to get something out of, even if it were only
a cab-ride or the use of his telephone; to Minnie a man was
sometimes that, sometimes a person to be avoided. But to
neither of them was a man a lovable and ridiculous chap who
hugged them and kissed them and gave them hats and sweets
and jewels because he worshipped the ground they trod on. To
hug Mrs. Wilfley was unthinkable. You might as well have
hugged Lady Hester Stanhope or Margaret Fuller, to take two
notable examples. And Minnie Gooderich, dissimilar as she ap-
peared to the unpractised eye, was at this time in the same case.
To Mrs. Wilfley marriage was a thing to cackle about, to Minnie
it was distasteful and irrelevant. To both of them Love was
a powerful but far-off* god.

All this, however, was subterranean and unknown to the two
protagonists. Minnie, her sleeves rolled up, washing from
plates the grease of what Mrs. Wilfley called u the matutinal
bacon," Mrs. Wilfley herself, flitting from office to office in Fleet
Street, were alike ignorant of it all and preoccupied with imme-
diate concerns. One of these was the hour of rising. Mrs.
Wilfley, having an artistic temperament, could not possibly get
herself out of bed before ten o'clock; while Minnie, being phys-
ically sound and well-balanced, woke naturally enough about
half-past six. To lie for three hours tossing about on a truckle
bed was torture and led to a discussion.

" It seems such a waste of time," she said incisively, and she
regarded Mrs. Wilfley, with her dishevelled hair and her dirty
dressing-gown, with disfavour. " Can't I do something? "

Mrs. Wilfley disliked noise. Her nerves were mere rags

CASUALS OF THE SEA 131

where noise was concerned, though she could listen to the sound
of her own voice for a long time. Minnie submitted unwillingly
to the ten-o'clock breakfast, and, after the housemaid's work,
lifted the lid from the typewriter and bent her level brows upon
a batch of manuscript. This was interesting. The first and
second essays were chaotic failures, of course, but Minnie found
herself wondering what, after all, there was in it. It may be
doubted if she would have made equally swift progress in a
school, for overlooking and fussy guidance were irksome to her.
She was one of those people who seem to learn with an economy
of failure inexplicable to minds whose interests are more dif-
fused. She was, to use an old-fashioned phrase, neat-handed.
To use a still older word in a new yet permissible connection,
she was " feat." One must attribute this to the concentration
of her small and compact intellect upon whatever she was en-
gaged. It explains, too, the curious fact that she paid no atten-
tion to the subject of the article she had transcribed, which was
an interview with the Prioress of the Convent of the Sacred
Heart. Quite without malice did she join up the maimed mem-
bers of a split infinitive and substitute a comma for a semicolon.
Common people do not split infinitives any more than they split
hairs, and semi-colons are to them needless refinements. The
humour of the thing was that Mrs. Wilfley did not notice either
modification of her own grammar.

The completion of the article brought Minnie to one o'clock,
and putting on her hat she went out, locked the door, and
descended into Fleet Street to get herself some lunch. To her,
unused as she was to the great hubbub of the City, the meal in
a vast tea-shop was novel, thrilling, stimulating. The " cafe-
habit " came to her at once, naturally and irresistibly. It abol-
ished the messing with dishes and the smell of cooking. It
gave her endless opportunities, too, of studying men and women
of countless types. The interest was unalloyed, moreover, with
any literary base-metal, for it did not occur to her that she
might write. Nor did she desire very much to know all these
men and women who thronged the streets, who filled the 'buses
and cabs and cafes of the street. Had one of them spoken to
her, the amused reflectiveness in her expression would have van-
ished behind an icy reserve, and the stranger would have needed
the will-power and assurance of Mr. Gilfillan to have dispelled
it.

132 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Towards Mr. Gilfillan she had developed an interest that was
a blend of respect and curiosity. With her usual economy of
emotion, and this is a common occurrence with girls of small
imaginative power, she had transferred to him all that she
liked in the Tiberius of the story, and left him, so to speak, to
justify his apotheoais. Mr. Gilfillan was, as already stated,
quite ignorant of his present rank, finding the chairmanship of
" Gilfillan Filaments Limited " quite enormous enough without
assuming the purple of romance. During the days previous to
the grand concert, when Minnie was busily employed in putting
letters into envelopes, writing addresses, stamping and posting
them, her frequent though brief meetings with that gentleman
had strengthened in her mind the notion that she enjoyed his
company. Instantly she was on her guard. She had had that
feeling before. Certainly Mr. Gilfillan was the exact antithesis
of the coal-agent's clerk. He was keen, clever, efficient, un-
trammelled by silly ideas. But, all the same, she had had that
feeling before, and the thin stratum of aestheticism in her
make-up induced a horror of emotional mess and untidiness.
She had talked of her feelings on one occasion to Mrs. Gaynor,
who had struck out a good phrase to describe such a state of
affairs. " You feel all at loose ends, I suppose," said Mrs. Gay-
nor, and Minnie had replied that that was just it.

" I suppose Mr. Gilfillan makes a lot of money," she had said
that morning.

For a fiftieth part of a second Mrs. Wilfley's unwashed eyes
flickered as she poured hot water into the teapot.

" Yes, he makes thousands a year," she replied.

" Eh ? " said Minnie, sitting up straight. " Thousands a
year? And lives in Stamford Hill?"

That was Minnie's way. Her clear brain bit right into the
heart of Mrs. Wilfley's luscious statements and showed the rot-
tenness of them. She knew he couldn't live at Stamford Hill
if he made thousands a year. There lay a striking difference
between the two brains. Mrs. Wilfley liked to think she influ-
enced a man with thousands a year, she imagined that only
people with huge incomes floated companies, and she had the
emotionalist's habit of slipshod statement. Minnie, on the
other hand, at once selected from her scanty knowledge of Mr.
Gilfillan the entirely sufficient fact that he lived at Stamford
Hill,

CASUALS OF THE SEA 133

" Well," went on Mrs. Wilfley, " he must control huge sums
of money. His company is a hundred and fifty thousand, or
something like that."

"What is it?"

" Something to do with electric light, I believe. I don't know
much about that sort of thing, it's not in my line, you know.
He's awfully clever, isn't he?"

Minnie was silent.

" I know he's awfully interested in you, my dear."

Another silence. Mrs. Wilfley looked a little pained.

" He took the greatest interest in the concert. You really
ought to thank him. Such a busy man . . ."

Minnie clacked her knife and fork together and looked
straight at Mrs. Olga Wilfley.

" I think the less you say to me about that concert, Mrs.
Wrilfley, the better. I'm fed up with the concert."

" Some people are very difficult to help," said the lady, sip-
ping her tea.

14 Who asked for your help ? And what did the help amount
to anyhow ? "

Several times in rapid succession Mrs. Wilfley 's eyelids flick-
ered.

" My dear child, the balance was handed over "

" Fourteen pounds, I know. That was a fat lot to get out of
seventy pounds eighteen, wasn't it? It's a paying business, I
should think, getting up concerts for people."

" I don't think you quite realise who you're talking to," said
Mrs. Wilfley, rising and going towards the bedroom door. " I
can refer you to numbers of the best people "

" I don't want you to do that. All I want is to hear the last
of that concert. Mother'll give you thanks for two."

When Mrs. Wilfley emerged again from the bedroom she was
dressed for walking, and going over to where Minnie was sitting
over a magazine, she stood there pulling on the fingers of her
long white kid gloves. Her face was composed, and she had
captured for the day the lustrous yearning look which was even
then becoming famous among the inmates of rescue homes and
night-shelters. " Nosey Mary " they called her among them-
selves, which is a damning proof of their depravity and shame-
lessness. Just as Minnie was beginning to grow restless under
the soft insistent sound of the kid gloves and the silent proxim-

134 CASUALS OF THE SEA

ity of the lady, the latter bent down suddenly and put her hand
round the girl's shoulders.

" My dear," she crooned, " you have a terrible habit of blaz-
ing out at people, you know. I'm sure you are often sorry for
it afterwards. We are all so utterly weak and despicable at
heart that we should not dare to judge others. Do you not feel
that? Sometimes when I have been talking to some poor girl,
trying to give her some little tiny bit of hope, I have suddenly
broken down and just cried."

" You ! " said Minnie, looking up and putting the book down.
"Why?"

" Because when I began to speak to her I felt terribly sorry
for her. It was just pity, you know. Then I would feel rather
glad because I had escaped so many of the horrors of her life.
And suddenly I felt how utterly impossible it was for me to
really know about any one who was struggling alone against
evil. I felt as if I was talking to her on the telephone hundreds
of miles off in the wilderness and all the while she needed some
one to be close to her, some one who had suffered with her. I
felt so weak and helpless; and do you know, when we feel like
that we are on the sure way to be really strong and helpful.
Mine has not been a very happy life, you know, as the world
counts happiness, but sometimes I feel that I have been over-
paid when a poor miserable girl has written to me and thanked
me, not for money, not for advice, not for anything material,
but for sympathy, just that sudden feeling of weakness and ig-
norance which made her see I was not doing it out of pride, but
out of love."

For a space there was a silence in the room with the dark oak
rafters and quaint old lanterns. Minnie sat lacing her fingers,
looking down at them intently. When she spoke it was in a
quiet, even voice.

" It seems to be all feeling with you, Mrs. Wilfley," she said.
" I don't take things that way at all. I suppose I'm selfish or
proud or something or other, but I never bother with other peo-
ple's affairs. If they let me alone, I let them alone. As for
helping people, I can't afford it. I've got to make a living
somehow and be independent as soon as I can. If I was rich,
like Mr. Gilfillan," here Minnie smiled a little, " I might give
a lot."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 135

" Oh, it isn't money that matters, my dear child. It is sym-
pathy a broken heart wants, not money."

" Is it ? Well, it seems to me that people with plenty o'
money never need much sympathy. When you've got money you
can buy anything. It's not the trouble that makes you wish
you were dead and out of it, it's the nag, nag of being without
enough cash. I know what it is, I can tell you. I don't mean
being poor with a little money put by for a rainy day, I mean
having a rainy day all the time, and all the week's money ow-
ing before you get it. It's all very well to talk," here Minnie
rose and stood by the window. " It's all very well to talk about
sympathy and helping others when you've got a bit, but you
don't get much sympathy when you owe money. We never used
to. Only Mrs. Gaynor. I do believe it makes no difference to
her how poor you are, but Mrs. Gaynor 's all right herself. She
can afford it."

" You will change, I am sure of that, my dear. You find the
world hard. Yes, why? Because you are hard. You think
every one is on the make "

"Well, aren't they?" asked Minnie without turning round.

" Of course not ! That is a horrible idea to get hold of. I
know hundreds of men and women who live unselfish lives, who
give themselves to others to try and make the world less un-
happy. There is no joy like service."

" I daresay what you say's true," answered Minnie. " What
I mean is, all these good people you know: are they worryin'
about the rent? It makes a lot of difference, they'd find."

Mrs. Wilfley turned from the table where she had been pour-
ing out a lukewarm cup of tea. She put it down again now
and sat down.

" Come and sit down, my dear."

Minnie came over unwillingly and leaned against the table.

" You talk about nothing but rent and money and things like
that. My child, your whole view is distorted and wrong. Look
at me. You think I know nothing of these things, I suppose.
You wouldn't think I have been a hospital nurse, would you ? "

"Were you?" put in Minnie, looking down at her.

"Of course I was. You'll read all about it if you read my
book. It's over there. You see, you are very ignorant of life,
Minnie, and when you blaze out at people you ought to be very

136 CASUALS OF THE SEA

sure you're quite right. Now let me tell you something. I be-
long to a profession in which we are always looking for fresh
ideas and fresh people. It is a profession in which experience
doesn't count for very much. Some people I know, men and
women, have been in this profession for years and yet are not
much good. And I have known a girl who had hardly any expe-
rience at all do very well because she had just the right tempera-
ment. My friend Mrs. Worrall is of great assistance to me in my
work among girls because she has the right temperament to find
out what they can do. Mrs. Worrall sent you to me because she
believed you would be useful in my work. But what I was
going to say was that in my profession we are always struggling
even more than other people against material wants, and yet
we have to think first about ideas and people. If I were to be
always worrying about money I should never do anything else.
Worry won't help me."

" That's what Mrs. Gaynor says/' admitted Minnie, but in a
sceptical tone.

" Of course she does. She's one of us. Mr. Gilfillan is al-
ways laughing at our ideas, but he really acts on them himself
very often, though of course he is on the make, you know. So,"
concluded Mrs. Wilfley, standing up, " you mustn't run away with
the idea that because you are a sharp, clever girl you know bet-
ter than anybody else how to run the world. As a dear old
friend of mine says, ' We all have our funiosities,' and you
wouldn't believe how strange that sounds from him because he
has so many ' funiosities ' of his own that he never dreams of."

For some time after Mrs. Wilfley had sailed out of her flat and
down the stairs into Fleet Street, Minnie Gooderich stood think-
ing seriously. She began to clear the table and talk to her-
self, as was her habit.

" She's a coughdrop," she commented several times. " I
wonder what it's all about. I s'pose people do get fed up with
me. Can't help it. Sharp clever girl, eh? Don't seem very
sharp and clever to stick here washin' up for her. She is but-
tery." Minnie stopped still with some cups and saucers in her
hands, her head uplifted as if listening. " No," she said, going
quickly into the back room and through into a tiny scullery.
" No fear! I've had all I want of that. I'm goin' through with
it. I'm goin' to keep on my own somehow. Anything but that !

CASUALS OF THE SEA 187

But O Lord, I must keep doin' something or I shall go dotty ! "

She began to wash up, working with quick, nervous move-
ments, working with that precision and economy of effort which
distinguished everything she did or said. One after another the
dishes were wiped dry and polished and put away. Then she
went back and made the beds, quickly if not perfectly, folded up
some stray garments and laid them away, and then, without
pausing, she entered the front room again and took up Mrs.
Wilfley's book, The Licence es of Love.

It may be doubted if the girl understood a great deal of this
book, which dealt with the lives of those women who have al-
ways been a problem in European civilisation. Mrs. Wilfley's
solution of the problem may have been correct or erroneous;
it matters not to us. The fact to be noted is that much of her
book was enigmatic to Minnie, because the girl had no knowl-
edge of the matter to guide her. She knew of girls at the fac-
tory, of course, who " did overtime " as they called it, girls
who had gone for " trial-trips " and so vanished from view.
But of the great underworld, Minnie, having been born and
grown up before popular fiction had made the subject peculiarly
its own, before really popular fiction had cast off the trammels
of respectability, knew nothing. She understood trouble and
misery to mean lack of money, for she could not go outside her
experience. The agonies of soul of Magdalens in high places
she could not feel. She was a child of Mammon in the sense
that everything translated itself into cost. Moreover, she had
a vague subconscious instinct, one might almost call it, that when
men and women did evil for money, when they fought for their
stands in the market-place and paid their way for all the world
like other people, the evil receded. These girls Mrs. Wilfley
was so solicitous for struggled as bravely in their way as wait-
resses and retouchers did in theirs; they had rent to pay and
clothes to buy. The evil of their lives did not come through
to Minnie, and Mrs. Wilfley's emotional stress (in print) left
her cold.

She put the book down at length and turned to a tiresome
exercise that Mrs. Wilfley had recommended as conducive to ac-
curacy and spctd.

Now is the time for all Good Men to come to the Aid of the
Party. Over and over again she banged at the keys, each time

138 CASUALS OF THE SEA

increasing in speed, and the drone and click of the machine was
soothing to her nerves. She was still at it when Mrs. Wilfley
returned.

" How do you like it? " she asked, smiling and drawing off
her gloves quickly.

" It's a change of occupation, of course," replied Minnie as
though that implied everything. " I don't say as I should like
a lot of it, but it can't be more monotonous than dabbing prints."

M Don't forget what you know about photography, my dear.
It may be useful to you in the future. Now I've got something
for you to do. I have an article to write. I want you to put
on your hat and go down west and just note down the things
in the shop windows."

"Everything?" said Minnie, aghast.

" Of course not. New things in the big shops. And if you
see a woman with something really chic on you can make a note
of that. You'll want a note-book and pencil."

" It's a new job for me," argued the girl.

" I know. That's why your notes will be of value. You have
innocence of eye, as the artistic people say."

" But I shan't know what they call some of the things. I
haven't any dress-making experience."

" Then go in and ask. I'll give you one or two of my cards.
Don't be afraid."

"Oh, I'm not afraid. Don't you think that, Mrs. Wilfley!
What I don't see is what the good of it is."

" Worrying again ! That independent spirit of yours will get
you into all sorts of trouble." Mrs. Wilfley had taken off her
hat and jacket and now seated herself at her table and opened
her bag. Seeing no further use in discussion, Minnie pinned on
her hat, put the cards in her purse and went out. In Chancery
Lane she purchased a note-book and pencil and mounted a 'bus
going west, a white Kensington 'bus.

On the top of the 'bus sat Anthony Gilfillan, deep in a thick
pamphlet and smoking an oval cigarette.

II

MRS. WILFREY had shown unusual penetration (for
which we give her due credit) in remarking that
Anthony Giltillan teas on the make.
Difficult and impertinent as it is, and futile into
the bargain, to sum up our brethren in one smart phrase, a jury
of the average sort would have confirmed the verdict. Yet,
like many other curt judgments, it meant, on scrutiny, nothing.
Wg say of a millionaire that his god is money. Is it? Very
flattering to ourselves, no doubt, our mediocre selves who know
nothing of the man's soul. It is stated with some truth by the
psychologists that the roots of a man's virtue are inaccessible
to us. So for that matter are the roots of his vices. Often a
fungoid growth, the mere result of early darkness and unusually
rich soil, will hide from us the latent and unlooked-for goodwill.
Later, when he became rich and powerful, when his sayings
became quotations beyond the business world, when he was
hated as an evil influence and hailed as a master of affairs, the
tale of Anthony Gilfillan's life was dotted over with these toad-
stools of unworthy acts, blots on his scutcheon, and people who
were neither clever enough nor brave enough to do likewise
shook their heads. "If I'd done that, I'd get into jail," they
would say ; or, " Clever chap ; d'you know how he got on ? Why,
some poor devil or other — I forget his name — went to him
with an invention. . . . Yes, Stole it! . . . Made a pot o' money
out of it. His Knighthood, too. How'd you s'pose he got that?
Didn't you see it? Why, Bought it . . .!" And so on. And
all the while the man himself was as hidden as it was on this
autumn day when he sat on the 'bus deep in his pamphlet.

The 'bus jerked and started again as Minnie mounted, and she
had sat down beside him before she recognised him. Without
looking up he drew closer to the side of the 'bus to make room
for her, and she felt a curious tingling sensation at being so
close to him. She had felt it when in his presence before at the

130

140 CASUALS OF THE SEA

lecture in Mrs. Wilfley's rooms, and now she wondered vaguely
why she felt like that. It was quite different, she summed up,
quite a different feeling from the mere self-satisfaction she
derived from the attentions of the coal-agent's clerk during the
first part of their courtship. She looked round and smiled, won-
dering what he would say when he saw her. Her pulses were
beating quickly, and a flush spread over her face as her thoughts
raced away into that spatial vastness which for some of us is
our only playground, but which is, alas, like so many real play-
grounds, vacant and dusty. She recalled Beryl Brentano and
Tiberius, and wondered what she would do in like circumstances.
Act haughtily, Minnie surmised, but was not sure. After all
he was not so very like Tiberius : that was only a first impression.
He was much more human in some things ; he had a little daugh-
ter, for example. And she was not Beryl, not by several streets
of houses.

Her mother, had she seen her sitting there waiting for the
man to look up, would scarcely have recognised her daughter.
An unwonted softness had invaded her face, the indomitably
hard little face that set itself like flint against the Maple Road
ideals. There was much of unsuspected childishness in her face
now, much of goodness. It was like the bloom on fruit. Touch
it and it was gone, mere soilure on your hands. The presence
of some people brushed it away from Minnie's face at once.
But as she sat there beside this absorbed magnetic man, her
whole conscious self was submerged in that ocean of feeling in
which we all swim, and the warm currents of it sent a thrill of
inexplicable happiness through her physical frame.

And all at once, as he turned a page, he glanced up.

" Is it possible ? " he said, as he withdrew his mind from the
pamphlet. "Well met indeed! Are you going far? Why
didn't you speak ? " And he threw away his cigarette.

" You seemed so interested," she answered, shaking hands.
" I didn't like to disturb you."

" Rubbish ! You've been having a good look at me, I expect."

" Yes, I have," she replied.

" And you are satisfied ? " he smiled.

" No," she hazarded. She was a novice in tit-for-tat con-
versation, but her pleasure in it and her native acutcness as-
sisted her. " No."

" That's a cryptic answer. How shall I take it ? "

CASUALS OF THE SEA 141

" Take it as you like. I can always say I didn't mean it that
way."

" Wise girl ! I am going to take it to mean you are not sat-
isfied and want to look at me still more. Is that a risky shot? "

94 You think a good deal of yourself, if you think so. A cat
may look at a king, they say."

He threw his head back and laughed.

" You are a most remarkable young woman," he said. " I
said as much to Mrs. Wilfley when she told me how you dis-
liked that concert business."

" I dislike it still," she answered gravely.

" Who wouldn't, who had any character at all ? I thought
the whole business very ill-advised when I came to study it, but
one must compromise in this old world. I have lived in all
sorts of places, and that is one grain of wisdom at any rate
that I have treasured up. One must compromise."

" I don't see now why she did it," said Minnie.

Mr. Gilfillan handed up a penny to the conductor to pay for
Minnie's ticket.

" It is a species of advertisement with her," he remarked un-
der his arm. " You see, she makes her living in a way quite
different from either you or me. You, for example, do so much
work, perform so much duty, and receive in return so much
money. It is a simple commercial transaction, the first step
beyond simple barter or exchange. I, on the other hand, have
a number of people, whom I never sec, working for my benefit.
I provide them with wages, pay the rent and other expenses,
direct the policy and receive my emolument in the form of divi-
dends."

" I see," said Minnie. She was interested in the matter be-
cause she was interested in him and he in her.

" Mrs. Wilfley, on the other hand, is what they call in jour-
nalistic parlance a ' free-lance.' That is, she spins out of her
head the stuff she sells. There is in her business no ' good-
will,' as we say in commerce, except her own name. Every-
thing which can assist her to extend the knowledge of her name
and so increase the ' goodwill ' of her business, she must be
ready to do. She saw a chance, I suppose, of increasing her
prestige in North London by taking a leading part in a charity."

" It's a funny thing mother only got fourteen pounds out of
seventy-odd taken," said Minnie, and her face clouded again.

142 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Twenty per cent ? Don't you think that a business which
gave fourteen pounds' profit out of every seventy pounds' worth
of business done would be a pretty good spec? I do. I only
hope my company will do as well."

"Where's the rest gone?" asked Minnie, still vague.

" Expenses : rent, lighting, wages of artistes, printing, sta-
tionery, postage, fares, telegrams, refreshments, gratuities. You
see, all the various people who are employed in such an affair
have no intention of working for nothing — they can't be ex-
pected to do so, can they? "

" No, I suppose not," admitted the girl. " It seems a great
waste of time and money to get so little out of it though."

" My idea exactly. As I said, a most ill-advised affair.
Here is Charing Cross. Where are you going? "

She told him. He raised his eyebrows.

"Do }Tou think you can do it? " he asked.

" No," she said frankly, " I don't. I think Mrs. Wilfley's
making a mistake. I think she's making a mistake in several
ways. Don't you want to get off? " she said abruptly.

"I'll go through St. James's Park," he answered. "Go on.
What are the several ways in which Mrs. Wrilfley is making a
mistake? "

Minnie laughed a little at the mimic in his tone.

" Well, in the first place, she believes, or says she believes,
I'm not exactly a fool and can do this sort of thing easy. In
the second place, she thinks I am fool enough to do this work
for her for twelve shillings a week; and in the third place, she
thinks I'd do anything rather than lose the job. She's wrong
all the way through."

" Have you told her this ? "

" No, of course not. Let her find out. Besides, you see,
Mrs. Wilfley isn't known all at once. She's got all sorts of
queer fits and starts. She was talking to me this morning as
if I was the Woman Taken in Adultery."

Mr. Gilfillan turned silently to the Haymarket to hide a
smile.

"Where did you get that illustration?" he demanded.

" Oh, there's a chapter in her book called that," said Minnie,
turning her ticket into a little cylinder of paper. " I was read-
ing it this morning. I didn't understand much of it, but I re-
membered that bit."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 143

" Well," said Mr. Gilfillan, " I cannot say once and for all
that you are right or wrong in being so certain about your lack
of ability, because I have always made a rule to believe I could
do anything if I only tried. For instance, I am a journalist
at times, for I write articles in technical journals, and what is
more, I get paid for them. When I started I had never writ-
ten anything and had never been taught. I sat down with the
fixed idea in my mind that I could write. And I found I could.
\Vhen I was asked, two years ago, to make a speech at a dinner,
I had never made a speech. But I got up believing firmly I
could speak, and I did. That is my rule of life. If fate means
you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow. Do you remember
Henley's magnificent lines:

' Under the blugeonings of chance
2Iy head is bloody out unbowed'?

That is my gospel. What do you think of it ? " And, prepar-
ing to rise, he turned and smiled down into the girl's face. She
was silent, but her face was aglow.

"What are you doing this evening? " he asked.

" Nothing."

"Well, my sister and little girl are away at the seaside just
now, so if you are disengaged I should like you to come and
dine with me somewhere, will you?"

" I should like it."

" What time? Say seven."

"All right."

"Charing Cross Post Office, eh?"

"All right."

" Then au revoir" And lifting his hat he went down and
dropped off the 'bus.

A moment later Minnie temporarily recovered her self-pos-
session and found herself opposite a big shop in Regent Street.
She descended hastily and joined the crowd on the pavement.
But she was unable to form any clear notion of the contents of
the windows. Her brain was still humming as a harpstring
might hum after the hand that plucked it had gone away. To
dine, to dine, dine, to dine. So the thought reverberated through
her brain, and set all the chambers ringing. He was a man, she
chanted voicelessly, he was indeed a man. He would never finish
head-first in a brook. He would not nag interminably about

144 CASUALS OF THE SEA

some trivial matter. He was a man, with brain, with energy,
with ideas, and he had asked her to dine, to dine. . . .

Lunch time passed and she moved up and down in front of
the shops unheedingly, her note-book clipped in her fingers with
her purse, untouched. Now and again her slim black figure
would attract a man's eyes approvingly, but she saw nothing
save men and women as trees walking, and the shining sunlight.

And then about three o'clock, she awoke.

" Oh, what shall I do? " she whispered in her heart. " What
shall I do?"

The honour of the wage-earner, that honour which is so com-
mon among us that no man questions it, turned her face to the
window of the shops, but the emotion of the moment still inter-
fered with her vision. With a determined effort she braced up
and walked to one of the great glass doors. Autumn shopping
was at its height. The calm, serene atmosphere of the place
was soothing and laid a steady hand upon that aggressiveness
which always seized Minnie when she was nervous and undecided
in aim. The frock-coated gentleman who approached her at
•once had appraised her before he had completed his bow. Shop-
lifters do not dress in plain shabby dresses and sailor-hats. He
was agreeably respectful therefore. What did Madame desire?
Minnie gave him one of Mrs. Wilfley's cards on the corner of
which was engraved the name Sunday Words. This was the
periodical for which Mrs. Wilfley did the domestic and fashion
notes, she being neither domestic nor fashionable and so emi-
nently fitted to give ex-parte opinions. The shop-walker, to
Minnie's surprise, seemed prepared for such emergencies. She
did not know that the fashion notes of Sunday Words M'ere copied
by dozens of local papers and provincial weeklies throughout the
kingdom, were sometimes pirated by American papers of the
;same type and then re-pirated by English weeklies of a much
higher type. Minnie, of course, knew nothing whatever about
•the matter, but the shop-walker did not know that. He merely
begged her to step this way and that way through the different
•departments to a private room where a tall, severe-looking woman
(dressed in a gown of plain faultless black was watching the
slowly-turning figure of another woman in front of the largest
mirror Minnie had ever seen. He spoke a few words in the
ear of the lady in black, and retired. Minnie's nervousness
intensified, for she was feeling to her very bones the shabbiness

CASUALS OF THE SEA 145

and uncouthness of her attire. Needless agony. In this great
repository of purple and fine linen the personal appearance of
a fashion-journalist was not a matter of trivial moment, it was
a matter of no moment at all. Quite oblivious to Minnie's pres-
ence the woman before the mirror continued to turn slowly, emit-
ting a dropping fire of criticism, and the woman in black muttered
continually in a low refined tone. " Yes, Madame." " Oh, quite
so, Madame." " Quite impossible, Madame, I agree," never
taking her eyes from the woman's body as it turned and turned,
head thrown back, eyes downcast with an expression of imperial
disdain, hand raised slightly as though dismissing some regal
suppliant, a tragic and, when you realised the moment, slightly
ridiculous spectacle. For it was not a virgin Empress who stood
there, it was not even a great artist rehearsing her part in some
decorative drama, it was simply a rich man's daughter trying on
a dress. The dress itself was pinned and tacked from neck to
floor, a thing of shreds and patches, thread-strewn and unfinished.

" Yes, Madame, I can loop it up, right up to the armpit. I
understand perfectly, Madame. Yes, and pearls — one row
right round the shoulder: exactly. The sleeve will hang down
close. Yes, to a point, like a wing. And the red band, you are
decided on that? Very narrow I should suggest, say about
three-eight's of an inch, stiffened with canvas. Yes, it is dis-
tinctly a conception. No other colour whatever? Very good,
Madame."

The woman before the mirror turned her back to the mirror
once more, threw her head yet further back, and took a last
long look at the billowing folds of the train, met her own eyes
for an instant in cold scrutiny, and then advanced to an inner
door. The woman in black sprang- swiftly to open it for her;
she passed in and the door closed.

The woman in black now turned to deal with Minnie. She
seemed quite as well apprised of Minnie's needs as did the gen-
tleman in the frock coat.

" We have several very chic things," she said affably, for even
dressmakers are affable to those who provide free advertisements.
" That was one of the best. Cream Mousselin-de-soie, pear!
embroidery and a single narrow band of geranium velours at
the waist but higher than is worn just at present. Here's a note
of it."

She took a sheet of paper from a big table against the wall

146 CASUALS OF THE SEA

and handed it to Minnie. The table was covered with press-
cuttings of designs, dress-cuttings, long tangled strips of ma-
terial pinned to figured slips, needles, pins, stationery, and order-
books. The modiste took up a sheaf of papers similar to the
one Minnie held and turned them over rapidly.

" I think the most striking are here," she said. " Did you
see anything outside particularly ... ? "

" A yellow hat," said Minnie promptly, rather to her own
astonishment. " I saw a yellow hat."

" With puce simulated wing under the brim ? Quite a crea-
tion, but of course only for race-meetings. That would not be
suitable for description in Sunday Words, would it ? "

" Chronic," said Minnie. " I was wondering who wore that
sort of thing."

" Kit- fox is coming in," went on the lady, ignoring such an
irrelevant remark. " You might make a note of that. Ten
guineas as an average. Oh, and there is this." She held up a
half-tone print of an impossibly tall female encased in fur.
" This is tail," she remarked, " very classical and sure to be
popular in October."

Minnie put the papers between the leaves of her note-book
and had an inspiration.

" That'll do," she said. " I've got a lot of other shows to
visit."

The customer emerged, dressed in a smart outdoor suit of
pale grey-green serge, yellow gloves, and a white felt hat with
a raked cock-feather. She was buttoning the gloves and did
not look up, for being in business as a rich man's daughter is
sometimes a very absorbing occupation.

The modiste opened the outer door, the customer passed
through, followed by Minnie.

" Thanks," the latter said over her shoulder. " Good day."

Out in the street she paused for a moment to see the departure
of the customer. An Irish jaunting-car waited at the curb, a
sumptuous shiny and silver-plated equipage such as Cavan or
Clare had never seen, attended by a red-haired little groom in
green coat, white breeches, and yellow-topped boots. He touched
his hat, leaped into position, and held out his gloved hand for
his mistress's foot. A little crowd collected, clotted, and melted
away in a moment, one of those innumerable momentary coagu-
lations which are a feature of our streets. The lady held her-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 147

self rigidly erect, and her clean-cut yet commonplace features
conveyed a new and startling impression of savage authority
and power as she raised the whip. The little groom ran round,
scrambled up on the off side and assumed the ridiculous attitude
of his class. The raked cock's feather on the lady's hat touched
the rosette on his glossy hat. The horse stepped high, shaking
his silver harness-bells, and they vanished among the traffic of
Regent Street. She was a rich man's daughter.

Minnie stood looking in that direction for some little time,
lost in thought. She had no clear indictment in her mind against
the rich man's daughter. Indeed, I think her attitude was
strictly neutral. " She's got it, she can do what she likes," might
express it succinctly. " When I get it, I'll do as I like," was the
corollary, accompanied by gritted teeth. She had, moreover,
the acuteness to perceive the keen pleasure a young woman can
derive from driving in an uncommon turnout through West Lon-
don. You drew the town, people could see your crest on panel
and harness, people stopped and looked and " got to know you,"
as their hideous j argon has it, in course of time. There was skill
in it too. You had to know your business to drive a horse like
that safely through the traffic of heavy pair-horse vans, swift
hansoms, cyclists, and view-obliterating 'buses. The rich man's
daughter, I imagine, had Minnie's respect, and this had a certain
steadying effect upon Minnie herself. These moods of preoccu-
pation with another person's destiny inevitably react in the
healthy mind, and teach it something of itself. Minnie had
nothing of the late Mr. Gooderich's purposeless optimism and
belief in luck. She thought the chances of wealth coming to her
were fantastically remote, which is one reason why she never
attained it. Mrs. Gaynor, in this connection, may be cited as a
reliable authority when she said to Minnie:

" Folks often miss what they're after because they didn't wish
hard enough."

Nevertheless, her brief consideration of life as it might appear
to the rich man's daughter led her to sound the probable springs
of the woman's happiness, and this reacting, she found her
thoughts darting and fluttering round Anthony Gilfillan like
moths round one of his highly patented metallic filament lamps.
She was looking into one of those long narrow panels of mirrors
that were becoming popular for shop-fronts just then, and she
encountered a pair of rather frightened dark blue eyes, a face

148 CASUALS OF THE SEA

whose even pallor was tinged with one of her slow blushes.
The adventure was calling her, and not in vain.

She took out her note-book and proceeded. An autumn negligS
of white fleecy wool, with French blue silk facings and sash, a
hat of ecru straw on which a young ostrich seemed to be sitting, a
gown that Mrs. Gaynor would have called " a party dress " of
blue taffeta with beads and transparent sleeves — all these were
mentioned on a page of the note-book. And then observing a
clock pointing to four she realised that she was very hungry and
tired. She was undeniably tired, yet she had merely loitered
away the day. She did not know that the wear and tear of the
emotions exhausts one's body and lines one's face much faster
than the work of a stoker or a navvy; she was too young. She
had always felt disparagement towards those girls at the fac-
tory who had told her how " done up " they were on some days,
they themselves not understanding the cause of their supineness.
However, food was to be got; the three hours to seven o'clock
were to be passed somehow. Mrs. Wilfley was to be seen and
fought with on the usual lines, so Minnie climbed once more
upon a 'bus whose ultimate destination was Peckham via the
Strand.

Ill

THE meeting was swift, unexpected in detail, and satis-
fyingly spectacular. It did not, of course, compare
with an Irish jaunting car in the least particular, but
far surpassed Minnie's imagined encounter (he lifting his
hat genteelly as he took her hand, and she smiling in a rather
fatuous way). Mr. Gilfillan, it happened, did not do things
that way. His agile intellect never missed the smallest oppor-
tunity of doing a thing in an original and effective manner.
Minnie was standing near the kerb in front of the Post Office
when a hansom came up at full speed from Whitehall, the
Trafalgar Square policeman, noting the silk hat pushed back,
the preoccupied stare of the eyes, the crushed appearance of
the occupant, had imagined him to be, if not in the Cabinet, at
least an under-secretary, and let him pass through. At first
the girl did not notice him, and when the doors crashed back
she stood away to make room for the stranger to alight. He
leaned out, extended his hand.

" I'm five minutes late," he said with a smile as she took
a deep breath and stepped in. The doors crashed together
again, and half a dozen pairs of curious eyes watched the brisk
little drama from the sidewalk.

" Paoli's," said Mr. Gilfillan to a massive purplish face which
gazed down upon them with Olympian indifference from the
little trap door. The trap fell and they were alone, aproned
from the world, speeding toward a new mystery called Paoli's.

"How did you get on with the job?" he asked, lighting a
fresli cigarette and examining a spot on his face in the mirror.
Minnie told him.

" Ah ! " he said. " I wondered how that business was done.
I see. Though why the readers of Sunday Words want — ah,
well I see that too, I think."

" They're servants mostly, poor people anyhow, so I suppose
they fancy themselves a bit when they read about nice things
rich people wear."

149

150 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Yes, and they make up their own things and get ideas from
the pictures, I expect."

" Yes, but what I can't make out is what good that does Bel-
lamy's," said Minnie, Bellamy's having been the shop she had
visited.

" Oh, undoubtedly it does them good. It must do so. It is
all advertisement. Every time the name Bellamy is repeated
in print or in speech, their hold on the public is tightened. In
the same way, I am paying thousands a year now to journals
throughout the world simply to repeat my name. In the course
of a year or two, when any man says Gilfillan, the other man
will say almost automatically Filament. I intend the words
Gilfillan Filament to become a sort of obsession with mankind.
You cannot take any isolated case of advertising and say,
* There, what actual profit do you get from that? * You must
take the whole thing in review."

" It seems to me that there's nothing else but advertising now-
adays. And when you buy it it falls to pieces," remarked Min-
nie. " I know mother sent ten shillings once to some firm in the
country for some stuff for a dress. It only lasted till the first
shower. ' Conquering-Hero ' Navy Serge they called it. You
ought to have seen it when the rain got it ! "

" Ah, that is, unavoidable. There has always been and always
will be unscrupulous humbugs to catch the unwary. That is
no argument against advertisement, however. You see, Miss
Gooderich, you must put yourself in the place of a person who
has something to sell. It may be the finest thing of its kind
that ever existed; if people don't know of it, how can they buy
it? Another thing. The Great British Public, on whom we all
live, doesn't really know what it wants. The natural tendency
of all communities is to be satisfied with what they have. The
community says, ' Gas is good enough for me ! ' and the man
with a new burner has to spend thousands convincing them that
he can give them something better. The community with the
new burner won't have electric light, they distrust it, it's too
newfangled. When they've got used to it, I or some other man
comes along with a new idea by which they can save nine-tenths
of their current and get two hundred per cent more light.
You'd think they'd jump at it, wouldn't you? Well, as I said
just now, they compel me to form a company of people who
have money and believe in me, just to spend that money like

CASUALS OF THE SEA 151

water in dinning into the public's ears that they will profit by
using our Filament. They don't know what's good for them
and so we have to tell them."

This thrilling and romantic explanation of certain phenomena
of commercial psychology brought them to Greek Street, where
Paoli's was situated. The interlude was useful to Minnie to
adjust her thoughts to hansom-cab conditions, and she was grate-
ful for it for that reason. When she jumped down to the pave-
ment of Greek Street and waited while Mr. Gilfillan satisfied the
purple-faced driver, she was ready to meet him on his own
ground, aggressively feminine, an alluring touch of malice in
her eyes. They entered the ristorante.

Paoli's was one of those diminutive eating-houses which make
the metropolis endurable to a cosmopolitan of limited means.
To give you a six-course dinner for eighteen pence, a flask of
excellent last year's chianti for a florin, bread, butter, and table-
napkin for nothing, and the most cheerful of Milanese to wait on
you for whatever you are pleased to give her, were noticeable
features of Paoli's establishment. It is true that the food was
the refuse of the great clubs of St. James's Street and Picca-
dilly, you dipped your knife in the salt-cellar instead of using a
spoon, and you used the same knife and fork throughout the six
courses, exactly as you would in Italy, but the cosmopolitan
of limited means neither knows nor cares about these things.
He may be an Irishman who lias studied art in Paris, a German
who studies law in Gower Street, or, like Mr. Gilfillan, a trans-
planted Scot who has engineered in many lands. Paoli's have
a welcome for him. Their snowy tablecloths and battered cruets
stand waiting, the cheerful waitresses flit to and fro, and many
a man of the above types, looking round while he bolts salted
almonds and digs his fingers into his crusty roll, has thought
to himself, " How homelike. I must bring the wife." For Mrs.
Paoli sat enthroned at the desk, rouged, massive of bust, benign.

" I thought you'd like this place," said Anthony Gilfillan
as they took a table about halfway down the long narrow room.
" Personally, I prefer it to those big pandemoniums with brass
bands and commissionaires, and all the rest of it, don't you?"

"I've never been to any of them," said Minnie. "And it's
no use asking me to give an opinion. I suppose this is a foreign
place, isn't it? "

Mr. Gilfillan was studying the menu which a freckled French

152 CASUALS OF THE SEA

girl had dropped between the knife and fork. Minnie eaught
the girl's eye for a moment and found it friendly. There lay
its charm, I suppose, for Paoli's was a friendly place. Great
bearded men in evening dress used to go there, neglecting the
sublime gloom of White's and its multitudinous cutlery, the
cheap wine recalling their strenuous days of exile and obscurity,
and when they left, smoking a cigarette, would drop gold care-
lessly among the debris of the meal, as a sort of libation to the
kindly spirit of the place. Minnie responded at once to it, and
laughed sympathetically when Mr. Gilfillan addressed the girl
in rapid but evilly pronounced French, and the girl replied in
still more rapid argot and stood smiling, her underlip between
her teeth and her grey eyes shifting from one customer to the
other.

"What do you say?" he asked, handing over the card.
"Shall we have the lot?"

" Please don't ask me," she said, a little confused. " You
know, anything you say will do for me."

" Well." Pie took the card back and examined it judicially.
"What shall we say, Juliette? Eh, ma mie? Diner, Juliette,
et vin Toscane"

" Chianti? Bien. Flacon, M'sieu? " rippled Juliette, her
hands hovering over the table. " Poulet ou canard, M'sieu? "

"Chicken or duck? I think chicken is safer, eh? Bien, ma
chore, Poulet, avec des pois, des asperges et du jambon, eh? "

" Merci, M'sieu." And Juliette, her red heels clicking on the
hard wood floor, fled kitchenwards.

Several disconcerting happenings delayed Minnie's longed-for
serenity. There was the arrival of a party of men at the next
table, two of whom wore evening dress and the third was dressed
in an old tweed Norfolk jacket and straw hat. Then again
the hors d*ceuvres, a bewildering array of indigestible rubbish
(so Minnie thought them), gave her food for thought if not
for body. Juliette would sail up, slap down a pepper-box and
some toothpicks, smile brilliantly, and whirl round upon a sedate
Frenchman and his wife, who tucked their napkins under their
chins, and ascertain their views on the jam omelette. The mir-
rors reflected to infinity the bizarre advertisements of foreign
table waters, stuffs called Strega, Salubra, Cognac, and the like,
daring drawings of a strange race of women who had legs and
(one regretted) did not mind showing them. And the panels

CASUALS OF THE SEA 153

between the mirrors were filled with drawings of men and women
who knew nothing of Maple Road, men and women whose beau-
tiful brown limbs took them over strange hills, whose red lips
breathed other air than ours, and whose fathomless eyes peered
through dim haunted forests, and down the vista of palaces
where white peacocks strutted, and ivory girls sat on golden
thrones. Of course, so blunt is our modern sense of art that
even cosmopolitans of limited means, even a conventional girl
like Minnie took all this as mere decorative drivel. " These
bally artists!" Or if appreciative: "That's clever, eh?
Rather fussy all those snakes, don't you think? Good motif
yes, but Lord, man! you can do anything with peacocks, and
it's all repetition." And so on. Anthony Gilfillan, who had
reached a conclusion on this as on every other subject under the
sun, could have explained it very clearly. But just now he was
explaining something else clearly.

" I am not a domestic animal," he was saying over his soup,
" though that may sound strange from a man who has a small
daughter at home. I draw on all sorts and conditions of people
for my existence, and when a man does that he cannot be called
domestic."

Minnie put down her spoon and wiped her mouth.

"Is it a game?" she asked bluntly. Anthony Gilfillan
pulled up short his intellectual chariot, took out the horses and
put them to bed.

" It's the most absorbing game in the world, making love
to everybody and everything in it," he said over the rim of his
glass. " Here's to my next affair ! " And he drank, his eyes
fixed on hers and twinkling.

" Now I don't know quite what you mean," she answered,
lifting her glass and holding it near her lips. " Do you mean
you're interested in everything, including me?"

He nodded. " Just that," he said.

" And will it be any good to me? " she went on, still holding
the glass up. For a moment their eyes met. For a moment all
the nice analysis of his mind was dimmed and softened, all the
calculation and antagonism of hers was effaced. Their eyes
met; a spark passed.

" It will be the time of your life for you," he said gravely.
" If you are the girl I think you. Now will you drink? "

And putting the glass to her lips, she drank.

154 CASUALS OF THE SEA

It was her first glass of wine, and the beginning, in a way,
of the time of her life. For from this on, she showed less
of that intractable materialism which had been expressed in her
intense preoccupation with money. From this on, even in her
days of degeneration, when Anthony Gilfillan had passed from
her life and gone on his upward triumphant way, she retained
something of the joyance of that first red wine. It discovered
in her a pagan carelessness, all too transitory, which Maple
Road had had no power to lure into view.

The sharp tang of the wine whetted her appetite, and she
ate the fish, the rissole, and the chicken with increasing freedom
and zest.

" I like this sort of thing," she said, reaching for the massive
pot of French mustard. " This is one of the things I've always
wanted to go in for."

She began to tell him of some of the things she wanted to
go in for, of Mrs. Gaynor and her sententious sayings, of Mrs.
Wilfley and her curious compound of altruism, selfishness, clever-
ness, and purblind idiocy.

" She's always taking me in a fresh place," Minnie told him.
" This evening, when I got back and asked her if I'd got enough,
she said, ' Oh, damn Sunday Words.* I told her straight she
wasn't goin' to damn me, and she got off the sofa where she'd
been lying and put her hands on my shoulders. It does make
me wild, that sort of thing."

" And what did she say? " asked Mr. Gilfillan.
" Ask me something easier to start with ! A lot about how
upset her nerves were, and she didn't always have command
over herself. And then, after she'd lain down again — fetch
her fur slippers and take her shoes off! What beats me," con-
tinued Minnie, " is how she gets me to do it. I didn't feel like
taking her shoes off. I felt a good deal more like smacking her
face."

" She certainly has a personality," agreed Anthony.
"Personality! I'll give her credit for this, that she can do
the creeping Jesus turn better than anybody else I've ever seen.
And we had several holy-willies up at the factory."

Mr. Gilfillan did not reply in words, but his expression showed
he was interested in Minnie's view-point. She looked round
hastily at the three at the next table, who were deep in their
own concerns, put her elbows on the table and her chin in her

CASUALS OF THE SEA 155

hands. " I haven't said anything wrong, have I ? " she asked.
He shook his head.

" When I met you on the stairs, you know," she continued,
" when I first asked you " — he nodded — " if Mrs. Wilfley was
a bit cracked, you laughed and said no she wasn't. Didn't you? "

He nodded again, pouring out more wine.

" Well, in a way you were right, I s'pose, but for all that
she's funny. Why has she taken such a fancy to me? She
knows heaps o' people. They were coming in all day yester-
day."

" Oh, that is a matter that can never be threshed out by talk-
ing. When you come to think it out we always want to give a
false reason for our likes and dislikes except the one case of
man and girl who fall in love. For instance, a man likes another
man and he explains it by saying they have similar tastes. A
girl likes another girl and puts it down to their common ideas in
dress and books or games. A boy likes another boy and is not
even allowed to explain it at all, the attraction is so objection-
able. Now all this is due to misconception. Each one of us
has an attraction for certain other persons irrespective of sex,
age, or race. I believe that even when there is intense friend-
ship between the members of the same family it is due to the
mysterious attraction which is called love, affection, palship,
affinity, and all the rest of it. You can understand? "

Minnie, sipping her wine, her third glass, smiled but shook
her head.

" Well, you've got some idea of what we mean by mag-
netism?" She nodded. "Very good. Certain dead things, or
things we call dead, have a curious attraction for other things,
just as — but can you imagine what I mean by chemical affin-
ity ? " Again she nodded.

" I did chemistry when I was at school," she said.

" Better still. Don't keep on telling me you don't under-
stand these things. You are better equipped for learning than
a dozen Mrs. Wilfleys. Just as, I was saying, certain chemical
bodies and compounds have a mysterious affinity for other bodies.
Sometimes the attraction is slow yet sure, sometimes it is vio-
lently sudden, as an explosion. And it's just the same with
people, only we don't know enough about people to say what will
happen when they meet. Sometimes it is just repulsion, some-
times slow attraction, and sometimes a violent explosion. And

156 CASUALS OF THE SEA

it's often the case when they attract each other most violently
that you get the most violent explosion."

" That's your idea, is it ? " she said, marking the tablecloth
with her finger-nail. " As it happens, I haven't any affinity, as
you call it, for Mrs. Wilfley."

"Did I say you had? I dare say, as a matter of fact, that
you hardly know yourself well enough yet to decide who or
what you like. Mrs. Wilfley, on the other hand, has a certain
amount of experience of the world which "

" Oh, bother her," interrupted Minnie brusquely. " Let's talk
about somebody else. Talk about yourself, will you? I'm not
— interested in her peculiar ideas."

" You won't be bored ? It used to be a bad habit of mine,
when I was a young chap, to talk about myself."

" No, I won't be bored. I like to hear about people who
do things."

And he began to tell her. He took her back to his child-
hood, a childhood spent on the road when his father, a boot-
maker, tramped southward from his Fifeshire home to London,
finally taking a tiny shop in Stoke Newington when Stoke New-
ington was surrounded by green fields. He told her of his early
penury, when he tramped at dawn to an engineering works in
East London, down by Thames side, to his long day's work,
and tramped home again at night worn out in body and mind.
He told her how he toiled by smoky lamplight, how he plodded
through the dark ill-lit streets, how a dream came to him of
a City of Light, where night was like day, and how he held that
dream through years of bitter struggle. He told her of his first
fruitless strivings to get his knowledge of electricity, when books
were dear and polytechnics only just beginning; how, when he
had risen to be a leading hand, he had been sent away to China
to assist in putting up some machinery, and thereby saved a
hundred pounds. He told her how he had come home, working
his passage on an old tramp steamer, a wheezy box of corrup-
tion, a common sailor before the mast, how he walked the London
streets looking for a job, so that he might save his capital for
his scheme. He told her how he had met the woman he married,
his landlady's daughter, how he had lost his job the day after
he was married, and the ensuing bickerings of his mother-in-law.
He told her how the mother-in-law had died suddenly and left
him with a sick wife and baby and a houseful of lodgers to look

CASUALS OF THE SEA 157

after. How he had taken off his coat and set to work at keep-
ing a lodging-house in grim earnest, how he had succeeded, tak-
ing the next house and working that too, finally selling the busi-
ness for three hundred pounds. Then he told her of his wife's
death of pleurisy and the addition of the hundred pounds of
insurance money to his slowly accumulating hoard. Then came
his sister into the story, a sweet-tempered girl who had never
met her affinity and who came to live with him and mother the
little girl while he went out into the world again. For he had
never given up his dream of a City of Light, studying French
and German that he might be apprised of all the science of
Europe, even groping after the perfect stuff he believed was
somewhere in the world. He told how he had gone out to
Buenos Ayres, then a sprawling, untidy city of crime, a sink
where flowed all the dregs and refuse of humanity, a place
where a dark street meant a knife-stab and every ditch floated
a corpse. Of his lonely life out there, first a driver on the new
railway, then water clerk to a Polish merchant who was coining
money in various obscure ways. Then came his turn of fortune,
when he met a mining engineer who wanted a manager on a
new mine; of his hermit life in the mountains, master of hun-
dreds of polyglot desperadoes. But it was good money he was
earning then, and the sister in London received half of it every
quarter, until she begged him to come home. But he did not
come home. He had found something in the mines, something
his long hours of research among dry German books of science
told him was worth looking into. And look into it he did, with
eyes that blazed with a furious passion for knowledge, with acid
and battery and tiny forge he looked into it until he saw the
thing he sought, the thing he had meant to find. Then came the
time for action. He came home and began afresh, learning step
by step the tortuous ways of finance, floating a small company to
get the capital to purchase the options on the areas where he
knew he could get the precious stuff he had found. It had been
a stiff fight, the business of convincing a few Englishmen that
he held the secret of mighty wealth, but he had done it, living
almost from hand to mouth, borrowing here, borrowing there,
sinking all his tiny savings into the venture, risking everything
and luring men by his gift of speech against their cooler judg-
ment. It was all, he reiterated, a matter of personality. If
men saw you were in dead earnest, if they felt you believed in

158 CASUALS OF THE SEA

yourself, they would do the most extraordinary things. One
man, a dour and cautious Scotsman, had sold Consols to invest
with him. Another had done something even more reckless for
an Englishman, he had sold houses and bought shares. As a
rule, he said, an Englishman would not sell houses to secure
an option on Paradise. And then, when he had given lectures,
had written article after article, had fought single-handed against
the non-metallic filament clique, he had promoted his international
company, had travelled all over Europe, over Germany, France,
Spain, and the Low Countries, seeking out men of capital to
watch his interests in their native lands, men of brains ready
to manufacture when he gave the word. Now it was all done,
the company was an accomplished fact, shares were being bought
even by investors, by brokers and directors of big electrical con-
cerns, the underwriters were sanguine and financial editors were
asking for particulars. He was safe now to a certain extent,
and yet, he admitted, he regarded this as only the beginning of
his career. She opened her eyes at this rather, but he repeated
that it was, in his opinion, only the beginning.

"Why?" she asked, as she stirred her coffee. "You'll have
bags of money now, I s'pose. Surely you don't want to go all
through it again?"

" Money ? " he said, his eyes strained with the long recital.
"Money! I'm not doing this just for money. It's something
quite different I'm after. No man could have done what I've
done just for money."

"Of course it means a good position," she admitted a little
doubtfully.

He turned to call for his bill and to hide a look of disappoint-
ment which he could not help crossing his face.

" When I first came to London from the mines," he said,
turning to Minnie again, " I began a book which I shall call
Success, by a Successful Man. Well, in that book I am not even
mentioning money. I am of the opinion that the man who
regards riches as success is damned. It is not even power or
fame, ' position ' as you call it, because when I began that book
I had neither. Money and power and position are only the
outward signs of what a man is. The rich fool, the titled ass,
have no interest for me. It is the man with Ideas who has my
love and respect. Ideas are the prime mover of this world we
live in; without them we are mere masses of inert ineptitude."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 159

" Has a woman got to have ideas to get your — respect? " she
asked gravely.

He was paying his bill, and she watched him carefully count-
ing the change left from his sovereign.

" A woman ? " he repeated abstractedly, slipping a shilling
under his plate. " A woman ! Let us get out of here and go
to a music-hall, and I'll tell you what a woman must have."

" I should like to know," she said as he opened the door.

IV

DURING the few minutes while the hansom was whirl-
ing them towards Leicester Square, their brains hum-
ming with wine, coffee, and the motion through the
glittering streets, they did not speak. He was tak-
ing her to the Empire, another haunt of the cosmopolitan of
limited means. The girl was excited more than she knew by the
story Anthony Gilfillan had told her. Something within her
responded to the indomitable will of the man. Pride in knowing
him and being his confidant, pride in his winning battle with dul-
ness and inertness, pride engendered by the mere swift motion
of the cab; these were the motifs of her exaltation as she jumped,
almost into his arms, at the entrance.

Men and women, some in evening dress, were going up the
great gilded staircases with them, solitary men of distinguished
appearance, men carelessly dressed and smoking pipes, young
men in groups, exquisites smoking cigars and laughing uproar-
iously at some inane smoking-room jest. There were solitary
women, vociferously attired, making their way up to the prome-
nades, women of undeniable beauty and grace who lived the
strenuous lives of West-End courtesans. These scanned Minnie
with a glance that seemed never to pause, yet which saw every-
thing, from her sailor hat to her worn low-heeled shoes. And
when they pushed through the doors into the great gilded audi-
torium, Minnie saw yet more women of this type moving slowly
to and fro, leaning on the backs of the seats, passing into the
lounges, a ceaselessly moving kaleidoscope of women.

Then went to seats near the front of the circle, and Minnie
found herself gazing for the first time in her life at a ballet.
For a while she sat silent, stupefied by the blaze of colour, the
intricacy of the movements, the sensuousness of the music.

" A ballet," he replied to her vague query. " You see, there
are no words, you know. Everything is expressed by gestures
and movements of the body and limbs. I am sorry we missed
the beginning of it."

"What's it about?" she whispered timidly.

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CASUALS OF THE SEA 161

" They call it " he looked at the programme in his hand,

m Parthenia, and it seems to be a sort of review of Woman
throughout the ages. This is a duel, I think. Yes, you see,
they draw."

The scene was the illumined court of a castle of old Italy.
In and out. of the many portals there danced fantastic figures,
on balcony and terrace cooed lovers, in silk and velvet, singing
a sweet minor love-song to the lilt of the viol and the soul-
piercing scream of the flute. In the foreground two men stood
confronting one another with long daggers, swaying to and fro,
advancing and retreating, their faces drawn with agony, the
while a bevy of fair women stood and watched. One of the
men was clad in the absurd garments of a mediaeval jester and
poetaster, those poor devils with a knack for repartee and sting-
ing verse who followed a ducal court as boys turn cart-wheels
behind a char-a-banc, and his mask, just flung aside, grinned
from the stones where it lay. His adversary stood stiffly angular
and stark, a silhouette in grim black, his sardonic features
writhen and set, his dagger flashing in the many-coloured lights.
And as they met thus, a woman among those who watched, a
woman superb in body and face, whose dark hair was a mid-
night of starry gems, on whose alabaster breast there blazed a
cross of diamonds, came towards them with light step and
rhythmic motion, indicating in the subtle hieroglyphs of her
art woman's hot passion and fearful joy in bloodshed. In lan-
guorous measure the music swept on, the fantastic figures in
their quaint garbings flitted in and out among the fairy lights,
the daggers darted to and fro, as the assailants stabbed and
stabbed until at length, soft thuddings of the drums heralding
a change of motive, the black phantom sprang and struck, and
the merry-andrew in his gay-coloured dress staggered and fell
dead. And then the music in crepitating crescendos held the
audience steady on the crest of the emotional wave while the
woman, the Parthenia of the ages, flung herself in wild abandon
upon the victor and received his dagger in her breast.

As the curtain fell and the music crashed and thundered and
the audience clapped louder and louder, Minnie found herself
withdrawing her hand in some confusion from Anthony's, whither
it had fluttered in the excitement of the moment. The dull red
colour slowly flooded her face and neck as she sat back in her
seat and waited for him to speak and break the spell.

162 CASUALS OF THE SEA

But for a space, he did not speak. He himself had been some-
what carried away by the magic of theatric art, inured as he was
to Wagner and the intensity of Spanish-Italian opera. The
dramatic anticlimax, the cruel contrast between the ensemble and
the episode, the fidelity to the primitive passion of humanity
of it, had gone home, and he was silent. He sat there in his
favourite crushed attitude, his deep eyes staring moodily at the
figures on the curtain, unconscious of the girl at his side. A
movement of her shoulder where it touched his roused him.

" There, in part," he remarked, " is what I think a woman
must be." A memory of the lodging-house keeper's daughter
flitted before him for a moment, but he ignored it and con-
tinued: M There too is what many women are, evil in life, yet
redeeming everything in death. Parthenia! H'm! The man
who wrote this thing out has brains. What d'you think ? " he
added suddenly, rousing still more and taking her hand again.
" What do you think — of it all ? "

And she, with softened features downcast and the slowly deep-
ening colour flooding her body, said nothing in reply, for it was
one of the few moments in her life when she thought nothing,
only felt.

" You're not bored ? You're glad you came ? " he asked
quickly.

" Rather ! " she answered in a quick breathless whisper.
" Don't — don't hold my hand, please."

But he held it, and the curtain rising as the lights dimmed,
continued to hold it for some time. The new scene was a Fete
Champetre, such as you see in Antoine Watteau's " Prince of
Court Painters." But it was Watteau in movement, Watteau
interlaced with light music and that wonderful thing which is
neither movement nor music nor colour — the play of emotion
on the human face. To show folly was the artist's intention
here it seemed, and to provide a way of gradual descent from
the high emotion of the previous adventure. For here woman
was soft and of a sugary pinkness, she sat upon the mossy
banks while satined young gentlemen bent in adoration before
her. Through the glades of the great green forest the sullen
red of the chateau roof could be seen glowing, boys and girls in
tinsel dresses pursued one another with gilded darts, the pink
arms of the ladies twined picturesquely about the necks of the
satined young gentlemen, who were resigning themselves to a

CASUALS OF THE SEA 163

future of endless caress, when the clear cry of a horn tore across
the gossamer tissue of the music, and the king entered with his
foresters and gentlemen. And there came the change as this
king of theirs, in his feathered hat and laced shirt and diamond
shoe-buckles came swaggering by. Each lady, springing to her
feet, made her deep obeisance to his majesty, and majesty, offer-
ing his hand to kiss, signified by a gesture that he would accept
her company. And as he passed into the forest again towards
the red-roofed chateau, he was surrounded by the fair false crea-
tures who had smiled and languished with the satined young
gentlemen so short a time ago. And the pretty effeminate affair
came to an end with soft lamenting music as the children pelted
the dolorous satined youths with their gilded darts and tinsel
balls.

Instinctively his hold of her hand had loosened as they watched
this ballet of artificial and false sentiment. The mind some-
times reacts very swiftly to external stimulus. If he had not
let her hand slip away she would have read into the retention
some of the insincerity of the scene before them. And he would
have thought her a little common if she had left her hand there
indefinitely, as common as if she had snatched it from his grasp
at the first. The grossest of men and women, however dense
and obdurate in response to eye and voice, are marvellously
sensitive to touch. It is a circuit of infinitesimal resistance, yet
capable of carrying currents of prodigious volume and pressure.
Not for nothing is the hand-clasp, the shoulder-touch, the waist-
girdling arm, the kiss, held by us to be potent factors of drama.
Physical touch is indeed the coarsest, yet at times the subtlest,
method of communication betwixt soul and soul.

" Do you like it ? " he asked. " Is it like anything that you
had imagined ? "

" I'd never thought what it would be like," she answered,
smiling. " I like it though. It takes you out of yourself, doesn't
it?"

" That is the intention. We come here to get away from
ourselves, our ordinary office-worn selves, and see some of the
light and colour of life. For myself I like this place, and I like
the ballet. For you mustn't imagine you can go anywhere in
London and find things like this." He indicated the stage.
" Most of these ideas come from the Continent, where ideas
are more common than in England. The people who live in

164 CASUALS OF THE SEA

the suburbs, now, would think all this very immoral, wouldn't
they?"

" I suppose it is," said Minnie soberly.

" Indeed it is nothing of the sort. It is just what you bring
to it and no more. Art by itself can only produce art. When
the sun shines on a swamp and breeds disease, you don't blame
the sun, do you ? Well, it is j ust the same with this sort of thing.
Because some people abuse Art, that is no reason why we should
not enjoy it."

" Then you'd do this ? come here, anyway ? You think reli-
gious people, and people like Mrs. Wilfley, are wrong? "

" Mrs. WTilfley?" he queried. " WThy do you couple her with
religious people ? "

" Why, would she come here ? "

" Just as often as she can get some one to take her," he replied,
with a slight smile.

M But she writes for religious papers. That book of hers is
full of religious ideas."

" Yes, but . . . You don't understand, I suppose. People
can't be labelled, my dear girl. Give yourself a label, now."

"Me?"

" Yes. I have here in my pocket, let us suppose, a lot of
labels. You must choose one. Religious, Proud, Humble,
Moral, Immoral, Careless, Strict, and so on. Which one would
you pin on yourself ? "

Minnie knit her brows. The curtain was up again and a
white clown, his eyes and mouth crimsoned, was busy with his
patter. She felt the force of her companion's argument, but
he could not go far enough to apply the argument to every one
she knew. The natural indolence of the human mind, together
with its natural cattishness, confirms the habit of labelling people
and makes it irresistible.

" Mind, a label need not be a libel," Anthony put in, and
she nodded and went on thinking.

" It's not so easy done," she decided. " I suppose it's be-
cause we know too much about ourselves."

" Partly. Also because we are too close to ourselves to sort
ourselves out. But what you will find, if you keep your eyes
open, is that labels are of no use. You must meet each person
as something unique in the world."

" Oh, there's a lot alike," she insisted.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 165

" To you."

" Really."

" You will find your mistake."

"Does it matter?"

" Ah ! " He patted his knee softly. " You are a strange
mixture. I don't wonder you hesitated to label yourself."

" What label would you give a girl like me? " she asked.

"Well, you see, you wouldn't take any joy in watching two
men fight for you, would you ? "

She shook her head slowly.

" Nor would you run away from me if a King or a Grand
Duke took a fancy to you? " he persisted.

She looked at him narrowly for a moment, then dropped her
eyes towards her hands. He laughed softly.

" What label should I give you ? Who can say ? You are
unique, with a uniqueness that responds to my own, and there
is the charm. Shall we go out, or would you rather see the rest
of the show? "

" As you like. I've had enough if you have. It's rather hot
here."

They rose and walked slowly past the banks of faces watch-
ing the Clown, faces set in a smile of good-natured tolerance,
breaking into ripples of laughter when he made his points.
They walked through the slow-moving procession of the prom-
enade to the exit, and Minnie's eyes were busy.

" What are all those girls? " she asked as they went down the
staircase. "Just walking about like that?"

They were out in the street before he answered.

" Don't you know? "

She bent her head forward in a quick way she had and peered
at him.

" Oh ! " she said, and made no further remark. They walked
on each busy with thoughts, eacli trying to recapture a certain
mood which" the departure had banished. She had developed
enormously in the last three hours, her range of emotion had
doubled, and she felt as though she were standing in front of
a door waiting for it to be opened. And he, who had opened
many doors, sometimes with a touch, sometimes with a sledge-
hammer, Mas pausing as if in irresolution, his hand on the latch.
He glanced at her.

She was walking with her head raised slightly, her small

166 CASUALS OF THE SEA

finely moulded chin thrust out. Had she been merely preco-
ciously coy she would have had her eyes bent on the pavement.
So they walked on under the stars that looked down on the
multitudinous uproar of the great city, two souls among millions,
waiting for that supreme moment that comes, we know not when,
" like a thief in the night," when our lips are touched with the
divine flame and our hearts burn within us. Terrible and sub-
lime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and
woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion! Who can
remain unawed by this colossal pageant of human love? Who
can doubt again the divinity of his kind if this vision have
been vouchsafed to him?

But the moment was not yet. Through Chandos Street up
through the narrow winding Strand, the Strand we strive in
vain to visualise, now it is gone, they walked through the press
of people streaming homeward from the theatres. The night
was noisy with wheels and hoofs, whistles and laughter, and the
raucous yelps of newsboys. * Grave News from Pretoria " was
the burden of the last, Pretoria where an old man sat at a council
board, an ominous enigma. Strange to say, Anthony Gilfillan
did not buy a paper; he was occupied with other things. There
was a lull in the roar when they reached the Law Courts, only
the lumbering 'buses and scurrying hansoms interfered with the
solemnity of the night. They looked up at the great gold face
of the clock, and as they looked the hour of eleven tolled. The
eleventh hour! A lad hot from Fleet Street rushed past them
at top speed, his poster bearing the words "At the Eleventh,
Hour/'

They turned into the dark entrance to the Inn. The gates
were closed, the girl noted in dismay and laid hold of his arm.
But he, knowing the custom of the place, jangled the bell, and
they stood, dwarfed among the giant shadows, till the night
porter opened to them. An old withered man he was, bent
and oblivious, a remnant of City wreckage washed into this quiet
nook each night, to open to late-comers and patrol the dark
quadrangle.

She turned to Anthony, but he touched her gently.

" Just to the door," he whispered, and they went on through
the chapel archway and across the cobbles to her door.

" Here," she said. " No more, please."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 167

He put his arm about her, holding her face up to his in the
darkness.

" What is it — what is it? " she whispered hoarsely, not know-
ing what she said.

" Here — you remember? — we met," he answered, and kissed
her.

WHEN a girl is in love, when she wakes in the
morning with a thrill of unreasonable happiness,
the material effects, trifling though they be com-
pared with the emotional cataclysm itself, are apt
to prove trying to third persons of normal and limited perception.
If she be a maid, things of worldly import, things like beds and
salt-cellars, the corners of window-panes and the wicks of lamps,
slip through her memory like ashes through a sieve. If a mis-
tress, she has a wider range of catastrophe and generally uses
it to the full. In either case, she presents to the third person
a spectacle of tragic incompetence and irreclaimable futility.
Mrs. Wilfley, whose descriptive powers drew largely from an
apparently inexhaustible stock of cliches, had said once that it
was " very beautiful to watch Love dawning in young hearts,"
that one felt instinctively (she meant intuitively), " that one
had not lived utterly in vain, if one had been privileged, even
in a trifling way, to unobtrusively assist some shy lover to the
temple of Hymen."

Perhaps because Minnie was not shy, perhaps because her
previous efforts in this direction had been chiefly imaginary,
Mrs. Wilfley's language did not fit the situation during break-
fast. That blend of calculation and sentiment, honesty and
obliquity, fluency and ignorance, which eventually lifted her to
eminence in journalism did not choke the development of fem-
inine curiosity. She had been informed with disconcerting
brevity, that Minnie was going out with Mr. Gilfillan. Her
desire to learn how the evening had been passed might have
been satisfied in peace and quietness and had abstained from a
certain patronage, which arose from her conception of herself
as an intellectual. She conceived herself as unbending to take
an interest in the child. To her pain and mortification, the
child behaved unfilially, blew up in fact, and refused details.
" I don't see," said the child after the explosion, wandering

168

CASUALS OF THE SEA 169

as she spoke into a dreamland of ineffable vagueness, " I don't
see — what it's got — to do — with you, with anybody."

" You are very brusque" said the lady, retreating into cliche.

"Eh? What's that?" asked the ehild dreamily.

" To be plain, it means rude," was the nettled reply, as Mrs.
Wilfley looked into the teapot. " And quite apart from that,
it's ridiculous to make a secret of it." Mrs. Wilfley shook her-
self as though to shake off the contagion of the girl's mood.
" Ridiculous! Tony will tell me all about it. He's a dear old
friend of mine. Tells me all his affairs."

Minnie brought her gaze back to the realities of life and
rested it upon Mrs. Wilfley.

" Then there's no need for me to say anything about it,"
remarked the girl, and rose from the table. She saw Mrs. Wilfley
gathering herself together for a spring, so to say, a spring which
generally landed her with a splash in a pool of sentiment, and
Minnie dreaded the drenching.

" What is it to-day?" she asked in a matter-of-fact tone.
" Give me something to type. I get sick of that line about com-
ing to the aid of the party."

Mrs. Wilfley, switched away from the pool, took the chance
of peace with alacrity.

" Here is my interview with Lady Gophir. Do you think you
could make it out? It's rather abbreviated, you know. W
means ' who ' or ' which ' according to the sense." Here she
showed Minnie a sheaf of pages torn from a reporter's note-
book. " And I've just scribbled in my impressions. This is the
beginning," showing the last sheet but one, " and this is the
end." And she held up the first.

Minnie examined the pages without enthusiasm.

" You can improve it if you care to try," Mrs. Wilfley said
brightly, as she left the room to dress. " I was too exhausted
last night to do anything with it."

"Anything else?" asked Minnie, possibly in irony. Even
she could see a hard day's work deciphering the interview, to
say nothing of the proposed improvement, to which no doubt
Mrs. Wilfley's work was susceptible.

When Mrs. Wilfley was gone, after trembling for a moment
on the verge of heart-to-heart monologues, Minnie sat in front
of the typewriter, her chin on her hands, thinking, and, as was
her habit, talking to herself. Her eyes were fixed on the square

170 CASUALS OF THE SEA

of blue sky visible where the top of the window was open, a
square of blue sky invaded at the corner by the grey beautiful
roof of the Record Office. It was a bright, blustering autumn
day, a day to call one out to the wind-swept country roads where
horse-chestnuts were falling in showers and blackberries shone
like jet beneath their leaves. No day to sit in a chair puzzling
at some other person's hasty scrawls. Who was Lady Gophir,
that her unhealthy preoccupation with fallen women should be
of interest to any one?

" I wish it was tea-time," Minnie said to herself softly. " Oh,
I wish it was tea-time ! " She paused, and her eyes that were
watching a white cloud crossing the blue square glinted with
laughter. " So Tony tells her all his love-affairs, does he ?
What a baby in long clothes she thinks I am! Every girl libs
like that when she wants to cut you out. I must ask him some
time on Saturday. Let's see. This is Thursday, to-morrow's
Friday ; two days to get through. Oh, well ! "

She rose, seized the manuscript and dropped into Mrs. Wil-
fley's Chesterfield, frowning to concentrate her mind on the writ-
ing. But it was of no use. Her mind refused to concentrate.
A mental view of Charing Cross Post Office at six o'clock con-
tinually interposed itself between her eyes and the paper. And
then there was a step on the stair and a gentle knock at the
door. She stepped to the door and opened it to a young man
with a fair moustache and a high double collar. He hesitated in
the manner of one who meets a stranger unexpectedly.

" Er — Mrs. Wilfley — is she in ? "

" Just gone out."

" Well, I called about a little matter — p'raps you can deal
with it." He took a long envelope out of his breast pocket,
drew forth a strip of typed paper and began.

" Come in," said Minnie, and he did so.

" It's on business, I s'pose," she added.

" That's so. , You see," he put down his hat on a chair and
showed her the long strip, ° it's this thing she done for us for
Reaver's Stomach Mixture. It's all right except it don't go into
details enough. We want more medical terms, you understand.
That's what we want, more medical terms, more realism."

" Oh," said Minnie sapiently. " I see. I'll tell her."

" F'rinstance," went on the young man. " This bit 'ere,"
he indicated the bit with his pencil, " it wants expandin*. She

CASUALS OF THE SEA 171

might make another par out o' that, I reckon. Somethink about
the gastric juices and the parenchyma. See?"

"Oh, yes, I see," said Minnie again. "Anything else?"

" Yes. This 'ere," he indicated another passage lower down.
" Now that's a bit over people's 'eads, that is. You can't put
that on the back of toilet rolls, you can't reelly."

" Back of what? " said Minnie, forgetting herself.

" Well, I know it ain't the sort of thing to discuss with a
lady, but, you see, Mrs. Wilfley she's doin' the job and we can't
let it stand as it is. I've made a note of it 'ere, see? A bit
more popular like, more snap to it."

" Anything else ? "

" You want ter get rid o' me, I can see that," he replied,
quizzing. " Busy? "

" Yes, rather."

" Oh, I see. Well, that's all. If you'll just tell Mrs. Wilfley
and ask her to let us 'ave it by Monday, will you? Nice little
place she's got here. Just suit me. 'Andy for the business.
You 'ere for some time, I s'pose ? "

" Very likely."

" Well. P'raps we'll see more of each other. What's on to-
night? Anything special? I'm on most all free lists, y' know.
Care for a run roun' the Tiv'li? "

Minnie regarded him with composure. She was admirably
adapted in temperament and experience to deal with him. His
was a type that she knew well.

" You are rapid ? " she remarked, almost as though in admira-
tion for his unexampled celerity.

" Yes, it's a 'abit. See a chance o' doin' a bit o' business,
I'm on it like a bird. Same with the ladies. Always ask, is my
motter; they can't eat you. As a rule, y' know, ladies take it
as it's meant — kindly."

"Mrs. Wilfley, does she ?"

"Oh, no! She's an auth'ress, yer see. Besides, she knows
the guvner. I always keep off the grass — good policy."

" Oh, she knows the guvner, does she ? Does she go out with
him?"

He opened his eyes and blew out his cheeks.

"You bet!" he said slowly. "Why, didn't you know that?
'E's away just now, you see, on the Continen*. Any time you
care to look roun' for a cup o' tea ! " He took out a card and

172 CASUALS OF THE SEA

gave it to her, a card giving an address in Whitefriar's Street.
She took it and put it with the strip of paper.

" All right/' she said. " I'll tell her."

He looked at her, the expression on his common smart face
changing from easy familiarity to guarded indecision. His
speech lost its careless trip and grew official again.

" Of course, anything I may say's in confidence between
friends, I 'ope?" He looked at his watch. "Well, I must be
off. Got to see a man at Shep'ard's Bush at twelve." He took
his hat and smiled at her doggishly. " So I'll leave the lovely
lady in her lonely tower, eh ? "

He made an abortive effort to shake hands, but she did not
move until he had reached the door. She stood there for a mo-
ment as he went down the stairs, and saw him pause at the bend,
look up, smile doggishly again, hesitate as though he might
return, and finally disappear. She closed the door and went
over to her work again.

It was very mysterious to her, and she decided she must ask
Anthony. She had an idea that he knew a good deal more
about Mrs. Wilfley than Mrs. Wilfley knew about him. She
had never reflected that advertisements did not write them-
selves. That Mrs. Wilfley did this sort of work seemed, for all
that, strange.

" Reaver's Stomach Mixture ! " she repeated to herself, her
lips curling a little. Mrs. Wilfley's enthusiasm for this pro-
prietary quack medicine was extreme, to judge by her eulogy on
the strip. In her opinion it was, next to Magna Charta and the
English Constitution, the most precious element of national life.
You felt, on reading her burning words, that if some one died
in defence of Reaver's Stomach Mixture, Mrs. Wilfley would
not have been surprised. Nor would she. She would have
promptly interested herself in a memorial to the hero.

* Frederick the Great once said" so ran the opening passage,
" that an army was like a snake, it travelled on its stomach.
Thiif is as true of civilians as of soldiers, as true of the Battle of
Life as of the Battle of Trafalgar. How true it is only those
know who have dropped behind in the march and are losing heart
for the struggle. Why is this? . . . See how insidious are the
means by which the Foul Spectre Disease makes his way into the
Fortress of the Soul. . . . Even when the enemy is in full pot'
session, the wretched victim is unaware of his condition.*'

CASUALS OF THE SEA 173

Minnie read the advertisement through and laid it on the
desk by the typewriter. The humour of the thing did not strike
her. She had not troubled to think who wrote advertisements,
and, now that she knew, she dismissed the matter from her mind.
It was of minor importance. As far as she knew she had neither
Gastric Catarrh, Gastric Colic, Incipient Cancer, nor Gravel.
Reaver's Mixture was irrelevant. " Are your Nerves worn to
rags? " chanted Mrs. Wilfley in fat capitals at the head of one
paragraph; but Minnie felt no response, no desire to throw her-
self unreservedly upon Messrs. Reaver's hands and try the effi-
cacy of a trial bottle at one shilling and three halfpence. She
took up the interview with Lady Gophir again. Did Lady
Gophir take Reaver's Stomach Mixture? she wondered. Was it
part of the great scheme for reclaiming Magdalens to dose them
with that Golden Elixir? Certainly she must ask Anthony Gil-
fillan some questions. And when Minnie came to that conclusion
for the tenth time in the course of an hour, she smiled and forgot
the interview. There was a more interesting interview to pon-
der over, an interview that would begin by Charing Cross Post
Office at six, and she sat for an hour dreaming.

Was she mad enough to believe that Anthony Gilfillan, a man
who was on the eve of making a large fortune, would marry her?
Was she besotted enougli with pride to figure herself as mistress
of a houseful of servants, stepmother to a girl at a boarding
school, the equal of other financiers' wives?

To tell the truth she was not. She was a young girl for
whom marriage had no intrinsic allurement. Nor had she an
exaggerated opinion of her sway over men. She was not a fool
or an idiot, and she would have been one or the other if she
had been bashful and amazed because Anthony had kissed her.
His attitude might possibly be enigmatic, but she knew her own
feelings well enough, though she lacked the ability to analyse
them. His intentions were part of him, and therefore acceptable
to her. His dethronement from the imperial chair of Tiberius
had not degraded him to the level of a common man. He was
still of the royal Llood, and therefore entitled to dispose of her
future.

She closed her eyes, leaning back in the scat, and gave herself
up to the genuine pleasure of anticipation. To-night would be
happiness certainly, with talk of many things, including Mrs.
Wilfley, but Saturday would be crucial. He had mentioned that

174 CASUALS OF THE SEA

he always spent the week-end out of town. He was, he said,
one of the inventors of the week-end omt of town. He had told
her it was delightful for him to get back on Monday to the brac-
ing air of the Metropolis after the Sunday stagnation. She had
a tingling sensation of terror and pleasure blended as she thought
of Saturday. Her mind evaded again and again the question,
" What will you do ? " She quieted it by trying to think what
he was doing at that moment, and the logical counter-problem
roused her. What was she doing? Nothing. After all, she
was supposed to do as she was told if she wanted to be paid.
She took up a sheet of paper, seated herself at the desk and
began to translate the interview, page one.

Lady Gophir, it appeared, lived in Mount Street, where Mrs.
Wilfley had seen her, " seated in her dainty pink boudoir which
was a perfect bower of flowers, from clusters of cream roses to
great sprays of stephanotis, all from the magnificent conserva-
tories in Herefordshire. Lady Gophir has them sent up specially
every day. ' I could not live without flowers,' she told me with
a smile as she deftly arranged a great Persian bowl of yellow
asters."

In short, Lady Gophir was experienced in interviews, and
told Mrs. Wilfley, whom she suspected of vulgarity, just what
that lady desired. They then warmed to their subject, which
was Lady Gophir's projected Home of Reclamation to be built
on some unprofitable land in a desolate part of Essex, where a
distant view of the North Sea would compensate the inmates for
the surging tide of Piccadilly. All the best people, so Mrs.
Wilfley learned, were warmly interested in it. One might won-
der why? Plain good food and clothing would be given, or
rather loaned, the refuges. Lady Gophir almost shuddered as
she said she dreaded pauperising them. Surely their lives were
sufficiently evil and unhappy without a stranger, even a friendly
stranger, pauperising them. Here followed an almost illegible
reference to panem et circenses, of which Minnie made a hopeless
muddle. Anthony Gilfillan, whom she interrogated on the sub-
ject during the week-end, told her it meant " Bred in Piccadilly
Circus," but his chuckle told her he was making a joke at Mrs.
Wilfley 's expense, and she let it go at that. An hour passed in
this way, and Minnie looked up to find the quaint little copper
clock pointing to lunch-time and the breakfast dishes still un-
washed.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 175

" Can't do both," she muttered, and fell again to work.

At two o'clock Mrs. Wilfley was still out, but the interview was
fairly coherent. Rather proud of such sustained labour, Minnie
put on her hat and was going out to get some lunch, when she
heard some one scampering up the stairs. It was a telegraph
boy, and he came right up past the ecclesiastical architect's door
on the right.

"Gooderieh?" he said to Minnie as she stood withdrawing
the key.

" Yes," she said, and took it.

" Reply paid," said the boy.

She opened the door again and shut it, looking round the
room in a scared way she had when a new experience assailed
her. It was her first telegram.

" Meet Westminster Office three — urgent, reply

Gilfillan/'

The white reply form fluttered to the floor as she stood reading
the message. She picked it up and spread it out on a corner
of the breakfast-table. Taking a pencil she wrote her answer
to

* Filament London

Coming, Minnie"

and opened the door.

"How do you get to Westminster Bridge?" she asked the
boy.

" 'Bus or Underground," he replied, putting the telegram in
his wallet.

" How long does it take ? "

" Quart' of 'n 'our," he chirped, and clattered down again,
whistling.

It was ten minutes past two. Minnie followed the boy down,
left the key at the porter's lodge, and went out into the roar of
Fleet Street. She would have a little lunch first, she decided,
as there was plenty of time, so she turned into an A.B.C. and sat
down.

Eating her scone and butter and drinking her tea, she sat
turning over various solutions of the new position. She took
the card he had given her the previous evening from her purse.

176

CASUALS OF THE SEA

THE GILFILLAN FILAMENT
Mr. ANTHONY GILFILLAN

Filament
London'

82 Old Queen St.

Westminster, S. W.

He had told her that it was close to the bridge, and now she
was to go there and see him. Two or three times when the cup
was near her lips she set it down again, as she grasped the sig-
nificance of the fact that she was going there to see him. It
would be an irrevocable step forward, this meeting in the mid-
dle of the afternoon.

She was glad she had gone to work on that interview. She
wouldn't have liked the telegram to have found her in a lack-
adaisical fit. And then as she sat in the glow of this beautiful
thought, a sudden possibility swept over her like an icy wind.
Suppose something had happened that it was all over, that his
wife had been found to be still alive, had come home and claimed
him, that he had lost all his money. . . .

For a moment she sat still looking straight before her, wait-
ing for her native common sense to rise up and push the cold
fear gently back outside. If any of these things had happened,
was it likely he would wire for her to go to the office to meet
him? Was it likely? Already she had enough of the free-wit
current in the world to know that in such a case she would
have gone to Charing Cross Post Office, at six, and simply —
waited in vain. In old stories, when the devil took people they
were wont to vanish, which demonstrates the sound psychology
of the old story-teller. In modern life, especially modern com-
mercial life, when people go to the devil, they also vanish, and
we hear of them no more; we, that is, who have been in merely
social contact with them. So slowly but surely, Minnie re-
gained her previous condition of sanguine expectancy, and fin-
ished her lunch with a piece of Russian pastry, the latter indi-
cating the genesis of a reckless mood. After viewing the tele-
gram from all points of her compass, she found herself unable
to hit upon a satisfactory motive for sending it.

She looked at the clock and rose to leave. It was twenty-five

CASUALS OF THE SEA 177

minutes to three, and she wished to be on time. A paper-man
told her to get on the Victoria 'bus and get off at the bottom of
Whitehall. She climbed on top, and the blustering autumn wind
made her hold her hat. It made her face glow, too, as it rushed
eastward, carrying stray pieces of paper high in air and mak-
ing the little flag on the 'bus rattle and slap sharply just over
her head.

At the bottom of Whitehall, when the conductor called up the
steps " Here y'are, miss ! " she began to hesitate, and half un-
consciously resented it. She felt aggrieved that in so serious a
crisis her mind should be clouded by an uncertainty of route and
the superficial shyness natural to strange surroundings. It put
her at a disadvantage, and in his presence, in his own office in
the plenitude of his power, she was alarmed lest she should
become what she would have called "jumpy." Her aplomb in
matters of ordinary daily life was not due to brutishness, mere
dead insensibility to psychic influence, but to a nice balance of
receptivities, the same balance which makes even little girls
sometimes behave sweetly to strangers, whom they hate, makes
them sometimes pause in a sentence about the governess and say,
" Isn't that pretty? " pointing to the flowers in a wet ditch. As
Minnie walked down towards the park gates at the end of Great
George Street, she felt keenly alive to the tactical advantage
Anthony would have in this interview.

" Oh, I wish I knew what it is he wants," she whispered to
herself. But she went on, holding her head high, for the ad-
venture still called to her. After all, was not this a greater
thing than would have ever happened to her up at the factory?
Whom could she meet who would be able to intimidate her?
And she went on round into Old Queen Street, gaining courage
as she walked.

Number 82 was a high narrow house on the western side. On
either jamb of the white door were painted names — names of
architects, of typists, and civil engineers. Above was a long
copper plate bearing the words in red letters:

Gilfillan Filaments Limited

On a white board in black letters in the entrance hall was the
statement that the registered offices of the company were situ-
ated on the top floor, and the reader was informed also that he

178 CASUALS OF THE SEA

or she would only be seen by appointment. Minnie read this
gravely and went on upstairs. At the top she once more en-
countered a door marked with the name of the company. The
name was getting on her nerves.

" It's as bad as Little Liver Pills," she muttered, and pressed
the bell-push.

A slide in a glass panel shot back and a young girl with a
spotty, cunning face peered out.

" Mr. Gilfillan in ? " said Minnie, musing.

" What name, please? "

" Gooderich." The slide slammed to again.

In a short time, too short for Minnie to experience any change
of mood, the door was opened by the young person.

" Step this way, please."

She led Minnie along a linoleumed passage through a door,
then along a carpeted passage into an office where two men sat
at big desks each absorbed in calculations, and thence to an-
other door whereon was inscribed in fat red letters, "PRI-
VATE" and at the bottom in small italics,

Mr. Anthony Gilfillan.

The young person knocked, opened the door, and Minnie, with
her habitual scared look round, entered. The door closed behind
her.

The room was small and exquisitely furnished. A red Tur-
key carpet covered the floor, on either side of the fireplace was
a great leather chair, and the walls were hung with etchings in
wide mounts. A rose-wood desk stood open by the window,
littered with papers and supporting a reading-lamp, a tele-
phone and half a dozen speaking tubes. The window itself was
noteworthy, for it was of stained glass, the design being Dioge-
nes hunting for an honest man with the aid of a Gilfillan Lamp.
But the most noteworthy object in the room was Anthony Gil-
fillan himself, as he stood with his elbows on the red marble
mantel, looking down at the wood fire that glowed and crackled
in the grate.

Minnie stood by the door for a moment wondering. Was
this really one of the secrets of his power, this faculty of mak-
ing a surprising situation? If he only drank a cup of tea in a
cafe he would do it in a way that made the girl, the manager,

CASUALS OF THE SEA 179

and the cashier remember him. Wonderful discovery of mod-
ern life — publicity! For Anthony Gilfillan it had passed from
being merely a pleasing fancy, a business proposition, an ad-
mirable policy. It had become the measure of his existence.
All things, frOm the High History of the Holy Grail to the
mysteries of the Upanishads, were for him the Instruments of
Publicity. All emotions, trained by his iron will, were units in
an army fighting for Publicity. Just now, an emotion had mu-
tinied and he was deliberating. He turned and faced the girl
standing by the door, so that she could see the haggardness of
his face.

" What is it? " she said, coming to him. " You sent for me.
What for?"

" To see if you'd come," he answered slowly. '* To test my-
self. Since last night I have been uncertain of myself. This
cannot go on."

"What can't go on?"

" Sit down." He pointed to one of the great chairs and she
seated herself. " What? I was speaking half to myself. This
state of mind cannot go on. I cannot give my mind to my
work? I have done nothing to-day. So I decided to settle it
once for all. I could not leave the office for some hours." He
waved his hand towards the telephone. " I wired to you to
come to me. And you have come."

" Yes ? " she said, looking at the fire.

" Will you come to me? " he asked, looking down at her. " I
need you. And what appeals more to you, I think, you need me.
I can help you to what you want, Life. I can show you many
things. For a time we shall be happy, I believe."

" It's wrong," she whispered.

" It is up to you," he replied, staring at the fire. " To marry
would be madness, I can see that. You are of a different type,
a type quite as necessary as any other, especially to men like
me. But . . ."

" No," she said.

" But as a rule," he went on, " girls like you have no choice."

" Well," she said, standing up in front of him, " have I got
any choice if — if I say I'll come?"

" I said it's up to you, my dear," he answered, putting his
hands on her shoulders. " Isn't that a choice? Or do you
think, are you afraid, I cannot make good my promises ? "

180 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" No," she said, finding her vein at last. " I want to. I'm

not afraid. I want to have a good time. But " she paused,

touching the edge of his coat with her fingers. Anthony Gil-
fillan followed her eyes and divined the cause of her trepidation.

" No," he said. " There are no buts. Why distress yourself
like this? You are trying desperately to talk to me now as
though we were equals, and this strange room frightens you."
He shook her gently and her eyes returned to his. " Leave the
thinking to me. Leave everything to me. Can you get into that
mood? "

" Just do what you tell me? " she queried.

He nodded. *' Just that," he said, and there was silence. He
put his hand to her hair where it escaped from her hat, her
plain little old sailor hat, and touched it lightly. Her small
pale face was composed and her bosom heaved regularly. The
unrest was dying out of the dark blue eyes as they fell and re-
flected the flames on the hearth.

So came the proposition to Minnie, in a guise she could
scarcely have foreseen. She moved a little to one side, holding
to his coat the while, that she might watch the red heart of
the fire. She had been barely four minutes in the room, yet
her attitude toward Anthony had undergone a change. Though
he had insisted on her inferiority, yet — she felt nearer to him.
The words " I need you," are as potent as ever, and Anthony
Gilfillan had made a slip in psychology when he imagined that
the converse " You need me," would weigh much. " I need
you " changed the atmosphere, changed their relative positions,
changed everything. As she stood looking into the fire, she
began to see still further the possibilities of the new situation.
The material side opened out before her. Here was this shrewd
business man, this tireless inventor, a man who had built up a
syndicate, master of those silent men outside, telling her that
he needed her. And as her mind slowly grasped this new view
it was startled and stimulated by the shrill buzz of the tele-
phone. In a moment Anthony Gilfillan had grasped the re-
ceiver on his desk and began to talk.

" Hello, Hello ! Yes, this is Filament. Yes, speaking to you
now, Hello ! " A pause, and Minnie stood motionless and tense.
" Hello ! Yes ? Somebody else cut in, I think. Yes, this is
Mr. Gilfillan. Is that Mr. Quaritch? Good afternoon, Mr.
Quaritch. I say! Did you get my note? Yes? — Oh. really?

CASUALS OF THE SEA 181

. . . That's very interesting. Is he coming to town? ... I
see. Oh yes, I must see him before he goes out East again.
Our Light of Asia Filament is the proposition for him you
know. . . . Well, I'm engaged all this week. Shall we say
Monday, at — let me see? " He turned over a scribbling diary
on his desk. " Monday at twelve. How would that do ? . . .
Yes, certainly, I'll write him. I've been planning a trip East,
you know, and it would simplify matters very much if we could
get a representative in Pekin first. — What ? — Oh, quite so,
quite so. You did quite right. Anything extra, of course, I'll
see goes through. What hotel is he staying at? Royal, Glas-
gow? Right. I'll write him this evening. How's everything
in your section ? — Good. Yes, all right. Good-bye."

He put the receiver back, pressed an electric button in the
wall and sat down to write an entry in his diary. There was a
knock at the door, and a trim young woman entered with pencil
and note-book. Minnie regarded her with piercing interest.
Here was another of Anthony's satellites, a mere cog in one
of his many wheels. The girl stood at his elbow without utter-
ing a word, merely whipping open her book and waiting. In
an even voice he dictated a brief letter to Yuen Shi Loo, Esq.,
Royal Hotel, Glasgow, begging him to favour Gilfillan Fila-
ments Limited with a call on Monday next at noon, when their
Mr. Gilfillan would have much pleasure in going into the ques-
tion of an Asiatic Agency already touched on by their Mr.
Quaritch. They begged to enclose particulars of their Light
of Asia patent, in which, no doubt, Mr. Yuen Shi Loo would be
interested.

"Enclose Light of Asia No. 17 and the General Catalogue,"
he remarked in conclusion.

The young woman made a few more hieroglyphics in her book
and departed. Anthony turned to Minnie, whose eyes were
bright with interest.

** Well," he said, taking her hands. " What is the verdict? "
She looked up at him.

" I wish I could help, here," she said.

" Here? No, I have something better for you to do. I do
not share Mrs. Wilfley's opinion of you, you know. She is not
competent to analyse a character like yours."

" You think I'm not capable, I suppose."

" That does not explain it. You can help me better by being

182 CASUALS OF THE SEA

my friend. I have not many real friends, you know," he went
on, as though thinking aloud. " A man cannot in business.
Les Affaires sont les affaires. I never see any of these people
here except in office hours. It would not do."

The young woman, after a light tap, entered again with a
basket of letters to be signed. Minnie watched her as she stood
there with downcast eyes, and wondered what her thoughts were.
She was a smart, graceful slip of a girl. A curb chain bracelet
hung on her wrist and a ruby ring glinted on her finger. En-
gaged, evidently, Minnie surmised.

Anthony sat down and read each letter carefully, making a
trifling emendation here and there, finally signing it with a
scrawl. When they were all finished the girl took up the bas-
ket and retreated without a word.

" Send Mr. Fitchett in, please," said Anthony.

He turned and looked at Minnie.

" Time's up," he said, smiling. " I wish you would sit down."
She did so, leaning forward and looking at him earnestly.

" Time's up ? " she said curiously.

" Yes, it's too late to draw back now."

She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes for a mo-
ment, letting herself drift quiescent in the stream of circum-
stance. It was a novel and delightful feeling to her, this sur-
render of will to a stronger power. In this mood she tasted to
the full the flavour of adventure in her life. Curiously enough
she recalled the strange, beautiful figures on the painted panels
of that little cafe of Paoli's, the girls seated on thrones amid
fountains and peacocks, girls wandering with their lovers
through enchanted forests. A tap at the door aroused her. A
young man with thin hair, brushed straight up, entered with
papers.

"Oh, Mr. Fitchett — just draw up a chair will you. I'm
going away for a few days. Shall be back on Monday morning
at ten sharp. The chief matter is the Tunisian Contract. If
Monsieur Couvrier calls to-morrow, you will have to go through
the whole matter with him. His pourparlers with the Mar-
seilles firm should be fairly complete, and it rests with him to
bring pressure to bear upon them to take the goods from our
licencees there. He has a prejudice in favour of British-made
goods, you know. Use tact, of course. Then with regard to
the Asiatic Agency. I have just spoken to Mr. Quaritch in

CASUALS OF THE SEA 183

Glasgow and arranged to see Mr. Yuen Shi Loo here on Mon-
day. If a wire should come in the meantime, relay it to this
address."

"Very good, sir. Anything else?"

" Yes. This proposition from the Bullard Company of San
Francisco is worth taking up. They know the territory and
can localise the publicity to much greater advantage than we.
We shall need a guarantee, of course. Mr. Godalming can deal
with that. He will be back from Manchester to-morrow morn-
ing."

" Very good, sir."

The young man with the thin hair took up his papers, per-
mitted his eyes to flutter in Minnie's direction for a moment,
and then retired. Anthony Gilfillan leaned back in his chair
staring abstractedly at the figure of Diogenes on the coloured
window. He had arrived at a curious condition of mind, this
financial visionary. Almost against his profoundest convictions
he had succeeded, for like most dreamers he had an underlying
touch of pessimism in his nature. Beyond his wildest hopes he
had trained his mind to one end, publicity. And now, with
regard to this girl whose frank unimaginative nature formed so
happy a contrast to his own experienced enthusiasm, he found
himself nonplussed. Publicity was not desired here, he was
aware. Mrs. Wilfley, if she heard it, could be trusted to give
it quite sufficient publicity among their acquaintances. Mrs.
Wilfley in this respect was his superior, he knew. She could
make her way into privacies and obtain advertising commissions
where even his indomitable personality had failed to gain an
entrance. In this particular he admired her immensely, but he
saw in dazzling clearness the need of keeping her ignorant of
this present adventure. He turned suddenly to the girl and
found her watching him intently.

" What am I to do? " she asked.

" Go back," he said. H Go back and wait for Saturday. Can
you do that? " He rose and leaned over the chair where she
was sitting. For some moments they looked into each other's
eyes without speaking, and then he stood up, and spread out
his hand with a gesture of helplessness.

"Can I have forgotten?" he said dreamily. "Can I have
forgotten? Or have I never learned? My dear." He took
hex hands and drew her up to him. " My dear, what can I say

184 CASUALS OF THE SEA

to you, you little snow-flower? Why do you watch me? Are
you afraid, after all ? "

" Go back? " she repeated. " I don't understand."

" Will you ever ? What do we know of romance, we two ?
And yet we will never know each other save by romance.
That's why I say go back. Here," he stopped, unlocked a
drawer in his desk and took out some bank-notes. " Take these,
buy whatever you like, and be ready on Saturday."

" What — what shall I buy ? " she stammered, holding the
thin crackling papers.

" Buy ? Romance, my child. Ribbons, flowers, scents, silks,
chiffons, rings for your fingers and bells for your toes."

She looked up at him with a smile breaking from her lips and
eyes, a smile of comprehension.

"Is that romance?" she asked. "Was I right after all,
when I said it was money did everything ? "

She looked at him and laughed in his face. " Wasn't I
right ? What's the good of anything — without it ? "

He stared at her. Even he, clear-headed as he was, had
never fastened to a prime truth as this girl had done. The
rosy mists of illusion had clung about his eyes so that he still
talked of the utter irrelevance of money to the soul of man.
He was like/ Mrs. Gaynor, like Mrs. Wilfley, an idealist, while
this smiling slip of a girl in her cheap worn dress and the
crackling bank-notes in her clenched hand, was instinctively a
realist. She might give him the purple buskins of imperial ro-
mance while she thought of him regardless of time and condi-
tion, but instantly, when the dream condensed to fact, when
they met face to face, she could only be reached by the cash
nexus, by dinners and theatres, by things that cost money. Love
in a Cottage. Noble Poverty and conjugal struggles with the
wcrld, the splendid friendships which keep artists from self-
destruction and inspire their finest works, — all these things were
mere vague outlines to her, she curled her lip slightly at their
approach. That she loved him was indisputable, but her love
was not the supreme surrender which many would have it, the
deathless clinging many think it to be. She was Danae in her
tower of brass, and Jove himself could only enter in the form of
a shower of gold.

"What's the good of anything — without it?"

CASUALS OF THE SEA 185

And as they stood there she recovered her position. He ha'1
been her master while she sat in the chair with her eyes clf^d
listening to his sharp staccato speech through the telephor and
to his subordinates, her master when he had caressed /er and
called her his " child." Now she was his mistress. She saw
more clearly than he the exact poise of their attraction, the ful-
crum of their relationship, the metallic pivot ,n which they were
balanced, and she smiled into his face with blithe triumph at
his discomfiture. He roused himself in* a moment.

"You really believe that?"

She waved the notes before his eyes.

" You see ! " she said. A thought crossed her mind, and she
touched each of the notes with her fo efmger, counting them.
He watched her, amused at her sedate pleasure.

" You see! " she said again, and rollii.g them up stuffed them
in her purse.

" You haven't even said thank you," re said gravely.

" Haven't I ? " She bit her lower lip, and her slow flush
mounted her cheek. A sharp peremptory ring at the telephone
made them jump. Anthony looked at his watch.

" You've had twenty minutes of my time," he exclaimed, tak-
ing the receiver. " Saturday now, ^don't forget. Saturday
noon." He turned to the instrument and talked swiftly for some
moments. *

When he looked round she was gone.

He threw himself into one of the big chairs and watched the
fire under his hand.

"Of course, I might have known that I would have no other
attraction for her. She is only a chrysalis just now. When she
has money to spend she will be another creature, with wings
probably. Well, I shall have what I need, psychic change.
What is it to me if she has wings. Wings are pretty. Money!
The little vampire! And yet, no. She has a pride. She could
not be bullied, I am sure. One ought to call her grasping,
callous, mercenary, yet one doesn't. Why? Pride, I suppose.
What a study her temperament is ! "

There was a tap at the door, the young man with thin hair
entered and they proceeded to discuss the draft of a new ad-
vertisement.

" I had a very pretty fancy just now," said Mr. Gilfillan.

186 CASUALS OF THE SEA

''What do you think of a girl with gossamer wings caught in a
t- ^le of golden filaments, eh? Light caught in a net, you
seer "

" hJ °Jlent, sir ! " said the young man.

"Publicity!" remarked Anthony Gilfillan.

VI

MRS. GAYNOR was sitting in her front room in her
rocking-chair, reading. Outside in Maple Avenue
the leaves were being blown about and defying the
efforts of an old man to sweep them into little heaps.
Now and again she would look up and watch him through her
curtainless windows, a bent rheumatic old mortal, feebly bat-
tling with the gusts. When she looked at him she imagined she
gaw a Parable. He was Humanity toiling to accomplish some-
thing which the winds blew away. Then she would go on read-
ing her book. She was glad of the wind, for her Monday
washing was done and the clothes on the line in the back gar-
den were being blown taut by it, and by evening they would all
be dry. Her neighbours said she was rather " near " to do
her own washing, for they were sure she could afford to pay
some one else to do it. But Mrs. Gaynor went on her way se-
renely, doing her washing in less time than her neighbours took
to steep it, and then sat down to read a book. Little Hiram
was seated on his hassock doing a lesson. Sometimes he would
rouse up with an " Oh, Ma, how's this ? " and she would bend
down to show him how. When he looked up and said quickly:

" Ma, there's Minnie Gooderich ! " his mother looked up too,
and saw Minnie coming up the path.

"Mercy! So it is. And isn't she tittivated out? Get up
and open the door, child."

" Well now, if you haven't struck oil, Minnie ! Sit down,
dear, and we'll have a cup of tea."

Minnie sank into the rocking-chair and patted the boy's
cheek, as he stood smiling beside her.

'"Ullo," he said genially. "Where bin?"

"Oh, ever so many places, Hiram — where 'd you think?"

"Not 'Merica, eh?"

" No, not America. Not nearly as far as that. Mrs. Gay-
nor," Minnie turned to where Mrs. Gaynor was busy with her
spirit-lamp, " where do you think I've been? "

187

188 CASUALS OF THE SEA

'* A department store, I should think, for one place," said the
quiet lady, looking at the girl's clothes.

" I should think so, but I've been to the seaside too."

" I thought you'd gone to work at Mrs. Wilfley's."

" Yes, so I have, but I'm leaving there, I think."

"Why, don't she suit?"

" She doesn't a bit. We've had a row."

"And she's paid you off?"

Minnie shrugged her shoulders.

" No, she hasn't."

"Well, I'm sure I can't imagine where you've picked up the
style along with those things."

Minnie smoothed down the skirt with a smile.

"Do you like it?"

"It's just perfection. And a bracelet, too!"

" It's real. You see, Mrs. Gaynor, I'm going to have a good
time. A friend of mine's given me some money."

" She's a real friend now."

" It isn't a she."

" Hiram, go right out, and take your hoop with you. You
can finish that cyphering by and by."

Mrs. Gaynor went on with her spirit-lamp and tea-things and
allowed Minnie to take her own time.

" I'm not going to be married," she broke out at length, and
still Mrs. Gaynor kept silence.

" Mrs. Gaynor, say something," said the girl. " I s'pose you
think I'm frightfully wicked? "

" What do you want me to think? What have you come back
to me for ? "

" Because I wanted to talk to you about it. Mother, she'd
be wild about it, I s'pose."

" Mothers are poor things, aren't they, child? How can I
help you? Is he a rich man? "

" Yes, he'll be very rich soon."

" Then why don't he marry you ? "

"We don't want to be married. He's got a little girl. His
wife died a long while ago. We want to be just friends. I
told you, I told you, it's to see the world I want. I s'pose I
am wicked, but I don't care, and — I thought you'd understand,
from what you said."

The girl paused after her outburst and sat with her face in

CASUALS OF THE SEA 189

her hands. Mrs. Gaynor came over and put her hand on her
shoulder.

"Minnie," she said in her even voice. "Are you real cer-
tain you don't care?"

"No — I don't."

" Then I can't do anything. I always thought you were a
queer child and needed careful looking after, and I'm sure of it
now. What's worrying you, if you don't care? Other women
have done the same thing. Sometimes they've bitten off more
than they could chew, and then they've gone down and down.
Sometimes, they've won through and it's been for the best. But
it's a big job, child. You can't come to anybody for help, you
know. This man, is he a real man, or only a whittling? "

Minnie raised her face, put up her hands, and unpinned her
gay hat.

" He's a real man, as you call it, and he's got brains as well
as money."

" But I can't see why you don't go to him."

The girl put the hat down on the table and lifted her face
again to Mrs. Gaynor's earnest look.

"I don't go to him," she said proudly. "He comes to me?
He needs me. I can't explain it at all. He is very lonely for
all his big business and his brains. He wants me to help him
to live. No, that doesn't explain it. But when we went away
on Saturday, and we were down at Clacton, I understood it plain
enough. We were so happy. He can talk and I can talk too
when I'm with him. We walked on the sands in the dark, and
he told me so many things, and I told him things, too. It was
never like that — before, you know. He was just like a boy
telling about his troubles. But this morning, when he left me
at Liverpool Street and went away to his office, I felt as if I
couldn't go on to Mrs. WTilfley, and I was lonely and wanted to
talk to some one who'd understand. So I came out here."

Mrs. Gaynor looked into the teapot as though its dark pol-
ished interior held the solution of her difficulty. In accordance
with her habit, she held her peace for a moment after Minnie
had ceased speaking. The lid of the copper kettle began to
flutter, a thin and beautiful jet of the steam came from the
spout and hung, cumulous, in the atmosphere. Mrs. Gaynor
fixed her eyes upon this as she began to speak.

" A long while back, Minnie, when I was a girl, I knew a

190 CASUALS OF THE SEA

school teacher like you. She was mighty clever, and when she
went from Concord to the seminary at Boston she just swept
the board with her essays and literature work. Her family
were a rather united one as a rule, and couldn't make her out
anyway. When she was through they naturally expected her to
come back and get married same as other girls. She came into
the store where I was selling underwear, and she gave me a
shock same as you did just now when I saw you in those clothes.
She came right on up to my corner, and when she saw me she
smiled and sat down to have a talk. She was going to Europe,
she said, and was laying in a stock. I said folks generally laid
in stock on the other side, and she said that was so and went
on talking about her friends. She asked me how the ' old folks '
were, and I told her she knew as well as I did I hadn't any,
for they never came back from Sacramento after — '49. That
was the gold year — I s'pose you've never heard of it. Well,
then I saw something was wrong with Terry — her name was
Teresa — and just let her talk away. At last she said he was
outside in the phaeton and she'd have to go, but I was to
come and see her at the hotel. When the store shut, and it was
some open in those days, I went along. A grand place, all
maple and mahogany panelling, and thick carpets on the stair-
ways and landings, and Terry was in a big suite right over the
vestibule. And, do you know, Minnie Gooderich, that girl told
me the very same story as you have. She was going to have
a real good time and she didn't care one rap for what people 'Id
think, only she wanted to tell me, just because she felt I was
safe and had never been very censorious. When she'd fin-
ished she asked me what I would do, and I asked her back if
he was man or a stick. He worshipped the ground she trod on,
she said, and I told her that was no good to the ground. I
asked her how long it would last, and she turned and got back
on me by crying she didn't care about how long or how short,
she was just going to drift. So I said, 'Well, Terry, by that
you mean, if it isn't one man, it's another.' And she said,
* Well ? ' and I picked up my umbrella and went straight home.
I'm afraid I was a little censorious in those days, when I was
younger. I had no patience with a girl who'd deliberately spoil
her career that way. Well, she came a good deal to the store
and bought little things as an excuse to talk to me, until the
day they sailed for Liverpool. The last time she came in she

CASUALS OF THE SEA 191

gave me an address in Paris where they were going, and I was
to be sure to come and see her some time. She'd got all her
smiling courage back by that, and all my black looks didn't sig-
nify. And the strange thing was that when I tried to imagine
that girl's family, all crazy with the worry and disgrace, I
couldn't. I was taking her point of view in spite of myself."

The kettle needed attention, and Mrs. Gaynor rose to make
the tea. Minnie watched her with strained attention, her palms
pressed between her knees.

" Mind, child, I'm telling you the truth and thinking the
truth at the same time, and so I don't believe it will do you
any harm to hear it. I didn't know as much as I do now, but
I had the Light even then and held my peace. My way was
plain enough, and I walked in it. I was always for the quiet
side of life. When I was married and my husband came over
here, he got word of Terry. He brought back a book he'd
bought which she'd written herself, and do you know, Minnie,
it was wonderful. It was just the story of a quiet New England
girl and how she had become a nun. There was a piece written
by a Frenchman in the front, and he told how the writer had
come to Paris, no one knew how, and settled among them, and
how she had attracted a lot of young men round her who lis-
tened when she talked and got ideas from her. The Frenchman
said he couldn't explain it in the usual way, but she did them
all good. She hadn't much time, for she was teaching folks
English all day and the young men used to come in in the even-
ings. I guess they pretty near worshipped Terry, from what
that Frenchman said. And when she took sick and died, they
all went to her funeral, a whole string of them, with wreaths.
And then they found this story in her room, and they got it
printed and translated, and there it was."

Mrs. Gaynor paused again to pour out the tea, and Minnie
waited for her to go on.

" Now I expect you're wondering what Terry's story's got to
do with your case, eh? Well, it showed me that we can never
be sure what a girl's vocation is in the world. If we were
all cut off one stick it 'Id be an easy matter. But we aren't
anything of the sort. Every single one of us is a new and
wonderful creation, and it 'Id be a miracle if we fitted right into
the place where we dropped, wouldn't it now ? "

" Yes, I s'pose so. But I can't write books and all that."

192 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Who said ? No one ever knew she could write anything
worth while, though to be sure no one would have been sur-
prised. It was her influence that made those young men flock
round."

" You do take her part," said Minnie, accepting a cup of tea
from Mrs. Gaynor's hand.

" No, child, I don't, any more'n I take yours. I'm just sit-
ting here trying to see your view of it, and it reminded me
of Terry. From what I could find out, she had a hard strug-
gle for two or three years, but then I can't see myself what that's
to do with it. She might have had more trouble if she'd stayed
in New York and married. People don't ever seem to realise
that doing what's right's no guarantee against misfortune. Look
at me, for instance. My way's always been along a quiet road,
and yet, I've had a terrible struggle at times, especially when
my husband had small-pox and died when Hiram was six months
old. It's the people who're comfortable who have time to worry
over little trivial things. All the talking in the world wouldn't
change your plans, I'm quite sure. You wouldn't have come out
here unless you'd made up your mind."

Minnie gave a short laugh as she stirred her tea.

" You seem to think I'm in for it anyway," she said.

" Deep sorrow means deep joy as well, child, for those who
find the Light."

" Light? What Light is it you mean? "

" I don't think you'd understand yet, Minnie. Your mother
asked me the other day just the same question. She said, ' Is
it conversion you mean? ' I said, ' No, not quite conversion,
because I've never been converted, and you can't judge by things
you've never experienced.' It is thought-power, I should say,
which helps you to understand yourself. And when you can do
that, why " — here the quiet-voiced woman stood up, her grey-
green eyes opened wide towards the light, and her serenity
touched with the fire of a profound emotion — " why everything
is as plain as plain can be. That's why we call it the Light.
Now you are in the dark, you can't see what's going to happen.
Some day, perhaps, you'll get the Light."

Minnie went on drinking her tea and looking out of the win-
dow. Mrs. Gaynor's explanation of her own mental evolution
was not particularly clear to the girl, but that perhaps did not
matter. Mrs. Gaynor's genius was subliminal; her influence was

CASUALS OF THE SEA 193

catalytic. She semed to effect, by her presence, changes of soul-
periods in which she herself had no part, remaining quiescent
at the back of things. She was indeed the right person for
Minnie to seek at this time, for she was the antithesis of An-
thony Gilfillan, the dynamic giver-out of energy, the restless
dreamer. She was static and receptive. Her mental pictures
were etchings, quiet landscapes set against the dry unearthly
Light of which she so often spoke. And as she sat a little back
in the shadow near the fire-place and looked out at the driving
leaves, she had one of those pictures clear-cut before her mind,
a picture of herself and her husband seated on the verandah,
he with his face raised from his paper as he listened to her justi-
fication of Terry. It passed quickly enough, even as Mrs. Gay-
nor set down her cup and lokcd at Minnie with a smile.

" I don't know how it is, Mrs. Gaynor, I'm sure, but it does
me good to talk to you. And besides, you know, in a way you're
responsible for this, because if you hadn't sent me to Mrs. Wor-
rall and so on to Mrs. Wilfley, I shouldn't have met Anthony."

" We're all responsible that way, but it doesn't amount to a
row of pins. Responsibility's like a string we can only see the
middle of. Both ends arc out of sight."

" Yes, that's true, but I can't help thinking of it, all the same.
Have you seen mother lately ? "

" Just passing."

" I think I'll look in and see her? "

Mrs. Gaynor looked at her in surprise. "Like that?"

"Well, why not? It's all black."

"It's a gay black, child, with those feathers. Oh well! Go
on, go right in then. I was only thinking how much English
women value mourning."

" Will you come in too ? "

" Surely. But wouldn't it be better to send Hiram and ask
your mother to step in and have a cup of tea, here ? "

" Yes, if you like."

Mrs. Gaynor went out to beckon to the hoop-trundling Hiram,
who had flashed at intervals across their field of vision.

Minnie suddenly became aware of a nervous aversion to meet-
ing her mother. That rather round-shouldered and insignifi-
cant figure presented to her a novel and disturbing front. Her
mother of course was an honest woman. She was, moreover,
her mother, and would scan her daughter's face with a merciless

194 CASUALS OF THE SEA

searing gaze. It appears, therefore, that a daughter who does
not care, for whom the stony path of conventional virtue has no
allurements, whose contempt for her mother is above the average,
can nevertheless flinch from the ordeal of encounter. Why was
this? Not vulgar fear: Minnie's reserve of pugnacity was enor-
mous. Not economic dependence: she could feel against her
flesh the gratifying abrasion of three of the remaining bank-
notes. Not contrition: when a woman is well dressed contrition
is with her a mockery and a sham. Not even physical unfitness,
for Mrs. Gaynor's tea was mild and Minnie never felt better in
her life. What then? I think it must have been that the con-
trast between herself and her mother would be so sharp that she
doubted her ability to " carry it off*." And then if she were to
. . . but as to the upshot of offering her mother money she had
not the imagination to divine.

Mrs. Gaynor returned. She knew the value of a hiatus in a
heart-to-heart talk, how often it slackens a taut thread or bridges
a perilous gap. Minnie felt the relief of her absence for a mo-
ment, and turning round set the feathery hat over on the head
of the sofa somewhat in shadow. She remembered this act
afterward; she remembered also that almost the first glance of
her mother's eyes went straight at the nodding plumes. At first
nothing was said while they waited for Mrs. Gooderich. Minnie
wished Mrs. Gaynor would speak, but to tell the truth, Mrs.
Gaynor, who was observant and had seen the postman deliver
a letter at No. Eleven that morning, was slightly apprehensive
of " a scene." She knew it would be better and more decor-
ously played in her house than in theirs.

" You didn't write to your mother, I suppose ? " said she at
length.

Minnie shook her head. " Why ? "

" I saw the postman go in this morning after he'd passed me,"
said the lady quietly finishing her tea and turning to the spirit-
lamp.

" Oh ! " said Minnie, quite unmoved.

And then Mrs. Gooderich in her weeds appeared and came
up the path.

Something made Minnie, when the door opened, stand up.

"How is it you're here?" said Mrs. Gooderich, sitting down
on the sofa. " I thought you'd got a place with Mrs. Wilfley."

" That's right, so I have."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 195

" Have you ? Then why does she write to me to tell me
you've gone away with some man, eh ? " And she drew an en-
velope from her pocket and held it out.

" Is that what she says? "

" Yes, it is, and I can see it's true ? "

" Well, don't shout, mother."

" Shout ! Wouldn't it make anybody shout ? To bring a child
up respectable, to bear with her every whim, and take her sauce,
and then have a letter like that from a stranger? And your
father not cold in his grave. You know you ought to be at
home with me; and I'm quite sure if you'd only been civil to
people at the factory, you could have stayed on. Ethel Tanner's
gone back."

" Mother, if you want to know why and how Ethel Tanner's
gone back, I can tell you, but I don't think you'd like to hear it.
Leave her out of it."

Mrs. Gooderich looked at her daughter's composed, colourless
face for a moment without speaking. Minnie, in spite of her
apprehensions, was " carrying it off." Her new black dress,
with its high-necked collar and its skirt clinging to the hips and
trailing a little behind, gave Minnie, as she stood there looking
down on her mother, a tall and commanding appearance. With
a characteristic lack of dramatic instinct, Mrs. Gooderich had
placed herself in the most ineffective position she could have
chosen. Letters, indignation, maternal authority — all were dis-
counted by this, that Minnie was better dressed and she towered
over her mother as she stood by the table. Mrs. Gooderich took
out a black-bordered handkerchief. She lacked the dignity
which weeds demand, somehow, and Minnie saw this. She
waited for her mother to speak. Silently Mrs. Gaynor offered
the widow a cup of tea. The fit of anger which had been fed
pn r since Mrs. Wilfley's letter had arrived was spent. Tea
and tears were to follow. She refused bread and butter weep-

ingly-

Minnie was ill at ease again for a moment. She herself never
wept and thought it silly.

" Don't, mother ! " she said at last.

But Mrs. Gooderich wept on silently, impassively, the tears
rolling down her small tired face and into the teacup. She had
been sorely tried mentally and spiritually of late. Her ap-
pearance in deep black at the chapel the day before had re-

196 CASUALS OF THE SEA

suited in a certain change of heart. Little Hannibal, also in
black and in thick-soled boots which kicked occasionally at the
pew in front, had wondered when the minister had patted his
cheek and smiled benignantly. He had wondered still more
when his mother had sent him to the Sunday-school after din-
ner while she herself had gone to the cemetery. Mrs. Goode-
rich was vaguely seeking consolation. The loneliness of widow-
hood has often this effect. She had always been desirous of
joining the chapel — church was too grand — but somehow there
had never been time. But now there was plenty of time; at
least she hoped so, tremulously. She had tried to pray, for
Bert in the barracks at Casterbridge who wrote of his chance of
" going out," for Minnie away in London, for Hannibal kicking
his legs about by her side, for herself, whose future seemed dark
and desolate; and she had gained strength, she thought. And
then that letter from Mrs. Wilfley, the kind lady who had so
generously arranged the grand concert, had upset her. She had
wasted energy by giving way to anger, talking to an imaginary
Minnie, neglecting her work and puzzling Hannibal with unex-
pected blows, so that when Hiram told her Minnie was at his
mother's, she had been taken by surprise. And as she sat there
weeping into her tea, she felt with a pang her utter impotence
in the face of her child's frowardness. It was a strange para-
dox, this erring daughter standing unconsciously contemptuous,
" over her mother." If the latter remembered the stockbroker's
wife of long ago, she showed no sign of that lady's tact. Our
conduct is indeed of a piece with ourselves, and Mrs. Gooderich
could not have behaved as her mistress had behaved. Driven to
silence, she wept. It may seem paradox again, but even if a
recital of her own misfortune could have brought Minnie back
to her, she would have died rather than utter it. That was
past. She had done the right thing, and her fault was buried
forever. And so it did not even occur to her to speak of it.

Mrs. Gaynor, somewhat perplexed, had gone on administering
to material needs and turning the situation over in her mind.

"Why don't you sit down, child?" she said to Minnie; but
Minnie only shook her head and looked over her mother at her
hat. She felt instinctively the advantage her position gave her.

" I'm goin'," she said briefly.

" Minnie ! " her mother started up and seized the girl's arm,
but Minnie drew away, bending over the table.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 197

" It's no use, mother. You don't understand and you won't
understand, so it's only wasting breath." She reached over,
took the feathered hat and set it on her head.

" Never look to me ! " burst out her mother.

" That's one tiling you can depend on, mother. I shan't do
that."

Mrs. Gooderich stepped back as though she had received a
blow.

" Minnie," said Mrs. Gaynor in a clear authoritative voice,
*' promise me one thing."

"What?" said Minnie without turning from the glass, her
hands still fixing the hat.

" Promise me you'll always write to me and tell me where you
are and how you are getting on."

H Yes," she said, " I'll do that."

" Then, Mrs. Gooderich, I'll do the same to you. And now,
Minnie, kiss your mother."

" Good-bye, mother."

It was a tragic moment.

" Now don't forget," said Mrs. Gaynor.

" I won't," said the girl, and went out.

m1

PART II

I

' ^Y | ^HEN, Madame, what do you propose to do? "
Stay here a little longer."

But I have mentioned already to Madame that
there is a fortnight's account due."

" He may return this morning."

"But if he does not?"

" I will let you know."

" Madame will not misunderstand me if "

" No, no. That will do now."

Somewhat nonplussed, the landlord of the " Three Pigeons "
returned to his wife. He had been glad of Madame's custom a
month ago. She and Monsieur had taken rooms at a time of the
year when but few visitors came. Truly, Monsieur appeared to
be a commercial, yet he was free with money, and going away
a fortnight since had ordered everything to be continued for
Madame as before. Now they were somewhat doubtful of the
issue. Monsieur was to return in a week. At the end of a
fortnight, which was this morning, the landlord of the " Three
Pigeons " made known his anxiety to Madame, who continued
to look out over the balcony at the bustling life and noise on the
Quai. He had no desire to be harsh: quite possibly Madame
was in a quandary herself. A day or two ... no harm could
surely come of a day or two's delay. His wife leaned her fat
elbows on the desk where she sat and hoped so. Tiding over
October to April was the problem of their lives, for commercials
did not as a rule come to the " Three Pigeons "; they preferred
the hostelries near the station. If Monsieur returned all would
be gay, if not all would be desolation. So closely are small busi-
nesses run that one bad debt will precipitate disaster. Both
landlord and the fat lady on the desk looked grave.

Upstairs, leaning over her balcony, Madame watched, with
apparent content, the scene below. The Seine, bearing on her

198

CASUALS OF THE SEA 199

broad placid bosom all manner of craft, waspish destroyers, huge
snub-nosed lighters, swift petrol-launches, slim white yachts
and rusty ocean-going tramps, was spread out before her. Im-
mediately below the sun shone down on the red and white striped
awnings of the cafes that line the Quai. Carts rumbled over
the setts, tramcars clanged and whined over the metals as they
moved off up to Bonsecours, over the bridges, down the Rue
Jeanne d'Arc, out to Darnetal ; and now and again a fussy Benz
motor-car would thutter and hoot its way among the throng of
people who waited for the trams. Up and down in front of the
cafes the merchants of the City promenaded, discussing their af-
fairs with gestures that seemed droll from above. The whole
scene was animated by the spirit of spring, and Madame, in spite
of the landlord's gloomy forebodings and disquieting interview,
smiled to herself. At length she turned away into the little room
and took from the mantelshelf a letter. That it had been al-
ready perused was obvious, for she displayed no haste. Smiling
thoughtfully, she unfolded the thin foreign sheets and laid them
on her knee.

9 Maple Road, N.
Feb., 1906.

My dear Minnie,

I received your letter from Antwerp and was very glad
to hear you were well. Hiram and I have had colds for some
time. He's been home here a week now, and I'm glad to say he
is getting on fine in his profession. He certainly likes the sea,
and I have great hopes of him. As soon as I got your letter I
wrote straight away to your mother. She says she doesn't like
East London at all, nothing but rain and slush all the time. As
she's said this for four or five years now (how times does fly!) I
suppose it has become a habit with her. She says Hannibal is
giving a lot of trouble. He seems to have lost his job at a ware-
house and is running about and getting into mischief. I'm afraid
your mother is not a very good manager. She wasn't here, I
know. She is just scraping along at the work your Uncle George
got her, and not venturing to get anything better. I must say
I respect your mother for sending back that money you sent.
Did you get it back safely? She won't go against her views
whatever any one says.

Now, Minnie, what are you doing with yourself? Are you
really happy, now you've seen the world and gone gadding round

200 CASUALS OF THE SEA

for so long? I often think of you and wonder. You say you
guess you've got all the pleasure any one gets out of life, but I
don't think you quite grasp what I mean. And that reminds me
that I saw Mrs. Wilfley the other day when I went over and
had tea with Mrs. Worrall. She was very interested in your
career, she said, because you impressed her tremendously with
your will-power when you were with her. And although she
believes you were quite wrong, which was the reason she wrote
to your mother that time, she still thinks you have a future. She
has just published another book on the subject of Women's
Rights and Moral Duties and hopes you will read it.

Hiram sends his love. He goes back to his ship, the
" Cygnet," in a few days, and I've just thought I would take the
opportunity to look in and see your mother. Certainly London
is a terrible place to get about in. I always find myself in the
wrong train in that awful Circle Railroad. And you know I
still live in hopes of seeing you and your mother reconciled. I
suppose you will shake your head, but I do believe if you came
back and asked your mother to forget the past, she would.
Your sincere friend,

Ann Butterick Gay nor.

Minnie let the letter slip from her fingers and sat meditating
upon the vicissitudes of her life. She was, as a matter of fact,
once more at a turning point. Since that evening five years
ago when she had returned to Clifford's Inn and found Mrs.
Wilfley with some friends at tea, she had maintained a steady
indifference to the obligations of friendship. Her brief notes
to Mrs. Gaynor had been but the fulfilment of her promise, and
contained little save a record of her changing address. Mrs.
Wilfley, indeed, had been hard put to it at first to explain her
interference, though the subtle suggestion, seized when she
gathered that Minnie had not seen the letter, that there was
nothing to conceal since Minnie was now an emancipated woman,
checked the girl's withering invective. The word " emanci-
pated " held Minnie's fancy, drew her attention back from petty
details and she saw herself in perspective once more. And she
found, moreover, that the only drawback to her full enjoyment
of the evening lay in her own ignorance of literature and art.
Her contempt for Mrs. Wilfley was shorn of its edge when she
heard that lady discussing a recent and famous novel. Cer-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 201

tainly the criticism was of no value and might have annoyed
the author, but it sufficed to emphasise Minnie's feeling that she
was " out of it." She left the flat, promising to return, and
sought Anthony at his hotel. The experiment had satisfied her
she would not be able to remain in Clifford's Inn. To his ques-
tion she had replied that she looked to him. He was busy at
that moment composing an arresting piece of publicity called
" The Shrine of Indolence," but he put it to one side at once
and took her out to dinner. She remembered that dinner. They
did not go to Paoli's that time but to one of the great caravan-
saries of the West, where the panels of the walls were of pale
pink satin, where the waiters wore claret and gold uniforms and
the lights on the tables had rose-coloured shades. A great
orchestra in the distance made a pleasing tumult that drowned
the noise of cutlery and dishes, and Anthony had ordered a
bottle of port wine. In many ways Minnie measured her present
life from that port wine. It marked the end of the prelude
of her emancipation. Thereafter she stepped deliberately into
the milieu of the first act.

And now it should be succinctly stated in her defence, that
her life had been in many ways restrained and modest. That
she had been the mistress of more than one man stands clear
against her. She should have been faithful, I admit, just as
men should be perfect. She failed, I suspect, for the same
reason that men fail, for the same reason that a sow's ears are
unsuitable raw material for silk purses. But of riotous living
and dishonest dealing there had been none. Her failure to
realise her first vague intentions as a sort of modern Aspasia
did not drive her to the quagmire of pilfering and blackmail.
In this I hold her honourable, and she herself had no qualms
at all, now, concerning her way of life. This fact I have already
remarked, that even crime, if co-ordinated and run on business
lines, loses its essentially criminal aspect; and you may hear
intelligent folk concede a half-envious admiration for the skill
and courage of a bank-thief or company-promoter — this fact,
I say, has a vital bearing upon the outlook of a woman such as
Minnie Gooderich is now as she sits looking out over the Seine
from her pavilion on the Qnai. You may, if you please, sit
at home in your family and deplore the profligacy of her life.
You may, like Mrs. Wilfley, grow in goods and fame by writing
books to prove that she cannot escape destruction and death.

202 CASUALS OF THE SEA

You may, like Lady Gophir, interest yourself in refuges for
her in her dreary and squalid decline. You may do all this and
fail to grasp the essential points of her defence, that feelings
control men and women, not thoughts, that effort is non-moral,
that finally you yourself, in your comfortable home, are as re-
sponsible as she. Mr. Gilfillan's fine Flowers of Publicity are
no more inevitable products of our age than Minnie's callous
independence of soul. We have cackled of the romance of busi-
ness until business is our only romance. We have slain Poesie,
and her pale phantom stalks amid our stark realities unrecognised
and undesired. We have seen Art on the street selling herself
for money, but we have lost the right and the impulse to rebel.

Quite unconscious of this trend of existence she sat there
looking out at the busy life of the old City of Rouen. She had
altered, as we say, since the days at the factory, altered some-
what for the better. Her face was a little thinner, her mouth
had more decision than ever, but her dark blue eyes were less
belligerent in their steady gaze. Her simplicity in dress was
noticeable too, she having cultivated a certain severity of line
which suited her spare figure and graceful deliberateness of
movement. /y Her weaknesses were perfumes and negliges. To
spray her clothing with aggressive essences, to sit, without cor-
sets, watching the up-curling spirals of cigarette-smoke, sufficed
to her for recreation, literature, and the fine arts. / She became
in a way a work of art, odorous and phantasmal. On some men
this aspect of her was the limit of fascination. And she could
smile too, exposing faultlessly even teeth, conveying in her glance
a profound knowledge of human life.

Of her wanderings there is small need to speak at length.
She had made Western Europe her seminary, her Didascalion,
learning rapidly and intuitively the things of which she had
need. As Mrs. Gaynor had said, "If it was not one man it
was another." Let it be said, at least, that she appealed gen-
erally to men of superior quality, and appealed, moreover, to
them as men and not as beasts. She was no Circe, turning men
into swine, but rather attracted them by her subtle air of de-
tachment and held them by an implication of mystery. ^That
men are more generous to their casual loves than to their wives
and families cannot be laid to her door. /She benefited by it
as your business profits by idiosyncrasies of the market, and
she thought no more about it.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 203

But just now, as she sat by the window, she was somewhat
weary of the play, and was meditating the possibilities of a
return to a less nomadic existence. Her anxiety as to the return
of Monsieur had been genuine though veiled before the landlord
of the " Three Pigeons." The latter's dulness had prevented
him from connecting the departure of Monsieur with that of a
certain steamer a fortnight before. Minnie was aware, however,
that that same steamer was due from Antwerp even now. But
she was wondering, nevertheless, whether it would be better to
make an effort on her own part and return to England for a
time. She would prefer that the captain of that steamer should
pay her bill at the " Three Pigeons," and on that account alone
did she prevaricate. A repetition of that unique experience, a
voyage cooped up in a berth in a rolling tramp-steamer, did not
appeal to her. She reflected with disgust upon the nausea and
fatigue, and the unpleasantness of the clandestine exit, to prevent
gossip, at midnight.

She rose at last, and picking up the letter opened her trunk
and took therefrom a writing case. It contained a thick packet
of letters from Mrs. Gaynor, for they had each kept the promise
made that afternoon long ago, and these letters were Minnie's
only link with her early life. Strained through Mrs. Gaynor's
fine sieve, her mother's attitude towards her seemed devoid of
bitterness, and lacked any positive note save that she was as
determined as ever to take no money from her daughter. Min-
nie laid the last letter on the packet and tied it afresh with a
piece of ribbon. She would answer it by and by, when she had
decided what to do.

When she had dressed herself for walking she went out and
descended the stone stairs of the hotel. Times were certainly
slack with the " Three Pigeons." The cafe was deserted save
for the landlord, who sat on the red-plush lounge reading the
Petit Journal, and Madame at her desk, engaged in her inter-
minable accounts. They looked up quickly as Minnie appeared
and passed out, nodding nonchalantly. They exchanged glances
and shrugs, and relapsed to their former abstraction in news
and figures. Minnie did not speak French fluently. She had
never remained long enough anywhere to feel the need of a
foreign language, and was accustomed to leave such bargainings
as were necessary to her protectors. At the same time she
could ask intelligibly for her meals, and even convey to the land-

204 CASUALS OF THE SEA

lord that his fears for Monsieur were unfounded. She turned
now up the Rue de la Grosse Horloge, and halting under the
very shadow of the grey arch, entered a restaurant where she
was accustomed to lunch. She liked it because it reminded her
of the little places in Soho where she and Anthony Gilfillan had
occasionally dined, little places more popular and more con-
gested even than Paoli's, where you all sat at one big board like
a family, and called the waiter by banging the pepper-box on
the table. So much did Minnie concede to sentiment; she
thought of Anthony without regret. But then she thought of
everything without regret; even of their parting, effected sud-
denly and quietly when he went to Mexico to arrange the forma-
tion of a new subsidiary company. It had been looming for
some time, he growing more and more absorbed in his great
schemes, she gaining more and more interest in trivial things.
She had met his daughter too, a grey-eyed convent-bred made-
moiselle, perfect in language and savoir-faire, and had been
stricken suddenly with a deep conviction that the girl would later
on effect her dismissal in summary fashion. She was indeed
no longer necessary to the dreaming capitalist and inventor.
His advance in fame and riches had brought him in touch with
famous men and brilliant women, women who knew more than
he, who had travelled and studied, who knew courts and kings,
who helped right and left to acquire ascendency over their hus-
bands and brothers, who led him into great country houses and
Mediterranean villas, whither Minnie, for all her restrained re-
finement, could not go. So they had parted, amicably enough,
he to his suite on a West-bound liner, she to her new attraction,
a square-jawed, brown- faced naval officer on leave, who found
in her small flat in Fulham a novel and delightful haven after
his China Station.

It was noon and the room was full, for others beside Minnie
appreciated the home-like cosiness of the place. The waiter
stood lashing the crumbs from the table with his napkin and
listened to Minnie's quiet, hesitating voice as she enumerated
her requirements. Removing her long gloves and laying them
beside her as she bent over the carte, she became aware of the
scrutiny of her neighbour, a middle-aged woman clad in fault-
less black. Minnie looked up at her and met a pair of wide-
open brown eyes in a face of powdered pallor, eyes shaded by
a large black hat that was set far forward in the style of the

CASUALS OF THE SEA 205

moment. The woman's smooth white hands had rings on the
short, slightly-pointed fingers, and heavy drops dragged at the
lobes of her small ears.

" Ingleesh ? " said the lady with a smile as she dissected her
cutlets, and Minnie regarded her with fresh attention.

" Yes," she replied. " Do you speak it, much? "

The lady nodded, munching.

" I live zere, in Inglan'."

"Do you? Where?"

" London ! "

"Do you?"

" Ver' good place, London. I have a bizness zere. You
have a bizness ? "

" No. I'm here for a holiday."

" Ah ! "

The soup came and Minnie took her spoon and began to eat
it. Her neighbour cut a piece from the yard-long roll on the
table and put it down beside Minnie's plate.

" What is your business? " asked the latter.

" Modiste an' chapeaux. A ver' small place but ver' good.
I like Inglan'."

" Yes," said Minnie. " It's a good place. I was thinking of
going back."

" An' ze Inglishmen, I like zem. You like Inglishmen, eh? "
The brown eyes glittered.

"Sometimes. Do you know many?"

"Ah yes! I, have many frien's Inglish, wiz plenty money.
Inglish sweet'eart, 'e spen' plenty money."

" Yes," admitted Minnie, tipping her plate away from her.
"That's true. You have an English sweetheart?"

" Certainly ! " drawled the lady, eyeing Minnie as though
doubtful of her comprehension. "An' you?"

" Perhaps. But not now. When do you go back to Eng-
land?"

" To-morrow, by ze night-train. An' you ? "

"I — I don't know quite. I am waiting for some one."

"Ah! An' if he no come?"

" Then I will come back to England with you if you like."

"Can you do the dressmaking?"

"Not much. Why?"

" I wish for assistance in my bizness in London."

206 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Their eyes met for a moment in a challenge, and then Minnie
finished her soup.

The meal went on and they became acquainted, in the manner
of their class, with each other's condition. Marie Antoinette
Letellier heard with approval of Minnie's reasons for awaiting
the return of the steamer, but she, with her somewhat wider
experience of the ways of seafarers, was not certain of Mon-
sieur's return.

" Ze Capitains, zey come zey go," said she, and Minnie seemed
to imply, by her grimace and her slightly raised shoulders, that
persons who pursued such a precarious calling might be quite
capable of a little uncertainty in their movements. Her com-
panion suggested coffee at the Cafe Victor, near the Municipal
Theatre, and she assented. They paid, rose, bowed to Madame
and went out into the busy little street which had been so busy
and so beautiful for so many centuries. Neither of these women
noticed anything about this narrow thoroughfare, save that it
was narrow and the shop-windows small. They walked down
towards Jthe river, Madame Letellier leading in the press and
talking over her shoulder.

" You, you have no frien's 'ere in Rouen? "

Minnie shook her head.

" Ah, I have many. I will show you."

"At the Cafe Victor?"

" Ah, perhaps. But if not — but I will show."

Arrived at the Quai, Minnie scanned the shipping quickly,
and then called her companion's attention to a funnel with a
yellow band.

"So?" said the lady. "He is arrive, ze sheep. You will
see him then, you zink ? "

" I'll wait and see," said Minnie gravely, and her companion
led the way along towards the Cafe Victor. But at the theatre
she paused, turned up to the left towards the great garage in
the Rue de Charettes and entered an apparently empty cafe.
A ghostly attendant rose from a chair in the rear and they
exchanged remarks unintelligible to Minnie, and then Madame
Letellier ascended the stairs to the first floor. Here again the
room was large and vacant, save for a little group of women
lunching by a corner window which admitted a limited view
of the Quai. A chorus of exclamations greeted them as they
appeared; Madame explained her companion with a wave of

CASUALS OF THE SEA 207

the hand, and sitting down entered into the conversation with
zest. Here Minnie became isolated, for the ceaseless inter-
jangling argot of the women was beyond her. She gathered
that one of them, a thin-faced good-natured girl, was describing
an indescribable midnight ride in the tonneau of a motor-car,
describing it with a wealth of gesture and detail that sent her
hearers into paroxysms of laughter. How the friend of her
friend who was supposed to be driving, tried to turn round and
look into the tonneau, how they missed a wagon by inches and
finally demolished a fence. Quelle vie! They all screamed,
and bent over their knees in ecstasy.

Minnie, sitting where she could see the water-front if she
cared to look out, and drinking her black coffee, watched them
curiously. She had, as a matter of fact, rarely come into touch
with the middle classes of her profession, the hardy demi-
mondaines who occupy a place between the Minnies and the ten-
ants of the tiny cubicles above their heads and in the Rue Victor
Hugo. She did not wish to come into touch with them exactly,
for women like her become accustomed to regard other women
as either rivals or servants. So she sat, well content to be a
mere witness of their mirth, drinking her coffee and looking out
towards the sparkling river.

The women themselves eyed her with quick appraising glances
as they laughed and talked, and assisted by Madame Letellier's
succinct hints, placed her accurately enough. So placed she
received their respect as one of the elite. It was their finest
ideal to be the mistress of a rich man, an ideal too rarely attained
in these days of competition and high rents. There was a cer-
tain reproach to their boisterous fun in her unobtrusive presence;
but none knew better than they that her repose was the result
of her position. Wait till she had to enter their ranks, and she
would soon find the need of companionship and high jinks to
keep her spirits up.

For Marie Antoinette Letellier their respect was less evi-
dent than their admiration and envy. She was a smart busi-
ness-woman as well as fastidious in her caprices, lucky woman
that she was! The lucky woman had no pride, however, and
talked in torrents of persons and places they knew and under-
stood.

Keeping her eyes on the people passing along the Quai, Min-
nie saw a little man in a blue suit and black bowler hat, and

208 CASUALS OF THE SEA

carrying a brown leather case, pass and disappear. She leaned
over and touched her friend.

" Voila! " she said. " He is come.''

" Bon" said her friend. " You are going? "

" Yes, I shall be at the * Three Pigeons/ " replied Minnie,
and nodding to the others, went out.

I

II

i 1 ^T" DON'T mind admitting you can make it very awkward
for me, very awkward/' said Captain Briscoe, as he ran
his fingernail along the ship's name on his brown leather
case.

They were sitting in the Museum, facing the " Death of
Madame Bovary," and the good captain was obviously ill at
ease. He was a small neatly-made man, with weathered features
and reflective eyes which were contemplating the tragedy on
the canvas. Whether he appreciated to any extent the sublime
pathos of that scene did not transpire. Seafaring captains are
not as a rule susceptible to the appeals of Art. He was looking
at it, however, and he continued to look at it because he knew
that Minnie was looking at him and he felt the delicacy of the
situation.

" I don't suppose, Mabel," he went on — (Mabel was the name
he knew her by) — " I don't suppose, Mabel, that you quite
realise what this means to me. You think I'm too easily scared.
But then you don't know Shields."

Minnie, alias Mabel, admitted that she had scarcely heard
of such a place before he had mentioned it, that she was hazy
even now as to its whereabouts.

" It doesn't matter, you haven't lost much. It so happens
that the new mate I've with me this time not only lives in the
same town, but in the same street. So it follows that I simply
can't afford to give him the slightest chance. ... If my people
were to think that I was going about . . ."

" Thank you," said Minnie. " You needn't apologise. I
only go where I'm wanted. You might have left me in Ant-
werp, though, since you are so particular. I was much more
at home in Antwerp than I am here."

" Now don't say you regret it ! " said Captain Briscoe, turn-
ing to her in consternation and putting his hand on her arm.
" Don't say that, Mabel ! I shall never forget it myself, as long
as I live. That fortnight here and that week in Antwerp I shall
not forget. I thought you were different from the rest. I
thought you wanted to come."

209

210 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Oh, that's all right, but what use is it my wanting if you're
so afraid of your mate you daren't see me in the street."

" Well, I am. If his wife wasn't a cousin of my sister-in-law
it might not matter so much."

" I suppose the fact of the matter is you're married all the
time and afraid she'll know," said Minnie, with good-tempered
irony.

" Not on your life ! Do you think, if I was married, that
I'd . . ."

" Thanks again," replied Minnie amiably, and Captain Briscoe
returned to his explanations.

" Oh well," remarked Minnie, who knew the utter folly of
losing her temper with men, " I shall have to manage as well
as I can, that's all. I will say this. You've come and told
me, and that's more than some sailors would do, so I've heard."

" Ah," he assented, " and some shore-people too."

They were silent for a moment, contemplating the " Death
of Madame Bovary."

" I'll tell you what I'll do," said the Captain at length. " I'll
pay the hotel bill at the ' Three Pigeons ' and cover the fare
back to Antwerp. I feel this way about it. I'd hate to think
you had any bad feeling for me, thinking I'd bilked you out of
a single cent. I want some time perhaps, when I get to Antwerp
again, and all's clear — you understand ? "

She patted his cheek lightly. " All right, George," she said,
smiling. "I'm sure I don't know the fare to Antwerp. Do
you?"

" Fifty francs'll cover it, I'm certain," he said, opening his
leather satchel.

" Mind, I don't ask you for this," she observed.

" No, I offer it. I can afford to pay my own way, my dear,
and pay for my fancies too."

He looked at his watch and stood up.

" I must get back to the ship," he said. " Well ! "

She sat looking up at him, almost winsomely. He stooped,
and with his hand on her shoulders, kissed her cheek. " Write
to me," he said.

She promised.

For a long time she sat in front of the picture by Albert
Fourne, which is entitled " The Death of Madame Bovary."

Ill

WHEN Minnie re-entered the hotel of the "Three
Pigeons " it was six o'clock, and no one had yet
ordered any dinner. Madame sat as usual, her
great account-books before her, eternally casting
up. Her husband, having read all the advertisements of the
Petit Journal, was perusing a back number of Le Rire, but with
a woe-begone face.

When Minnie passed through alone, they looked up and ex-
changed shrugs. Evidently there was a misfortune in store
for them. Taking the ponderous key from the board, she
ascended to her room. There was a smile on her lips as she took
off her walking things, and then removing her blouse, began
to wash. One of her passions was cleanliness of body, another
was the purity of her linen. The latter had become a cult.
Perfume and feathers, laces and even jewellery she would have
abandoned in indigence before linen. A woman might catch a
man's attention with her finery, but it was, in her opinion, the
immaculateness of the intimacies which would hold him if he
were worth the holding. But of this she was not thinking as
she laved her bare arms and neck, the small flat oval of trans-
parent soap gleaming like a topaz in her fingers. She was
thinking of the good captain's ethics and wondering if he were
a type. For Minnie with leisure had developed an interest in
types, and was often amused with the serious moral theories held
by her lovers. These theories never held them back from any-
thing they desired, she noticed. Captain Briscoe was a case in
point. The trim little man, with his knowledge of the world
as he conceived it, a world of agents who wanted to rob his
owners, crews who wanted more than they signed for, respectable
friends and relatives who demanded a flawless reputation of
him in return for their favour, — this trim little man, I say, in
spite of all this, had a touch of real romance in his soul. But
to his misfortune he had met Minnie as a courtesan and he
could not rearrange his ideas to suit the change in his feelings.

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Had she been only rated as respectable when he first encountered
her, she would have been his choice, she would have been offered
his name and the privilege of kissing numberless female relatives
whenever she met them, besides the command of a semi-detached
residence in Shields. But she had not been so rated, and the
tangle of emotional and ethical impulses seemed inextricable.
It had led him to a comical contradiction in his language, had
led him to caress and insult her in almost the same moment.

She smiled in the glass as she remembered the parting. What
extraordinary creatures were men. There was that young chap,
a Consul's son of all people, who had expressed his unplumb-
able contempt for " any bounder who would bilk a woman," and
had vanished from the scene like a morning mist, leaving her
in the lurch. . . .

There was a knock at the door.

" Come in," said the lady, taking up a small soft white towel.

" Pardon, Madame," said a voice as the door opened and
closed quickly.

" Oh, come in, Monsieur, come in ! Is it anything very
important ? "

" Only this, Madame." And the landlord, still holding the
knob of the door with his left hand, as if in protection from
the lady's charms, sidled into the room and extended a card
held between two fingers. Minnie paused in her vigorous use
of the towel to crane her head to read the inscription.

" Tell her to come up, please."

" Certainly, Madame ? And — er — is it impertinent to ask
what Madame's plans are ? "

" Yes — I mean No. Give me the bill to-morrow morning.
I am leaving by the night boat at Dieppe."

" Excellent, Madame. I will make it out up to to-morrow
night. You will require dinner ? "

" Send Madame Letellier up here," cut in Minnie.

Madame Letellier appeared, cool and composed, with her per-
fect-fitting corsets and attention to details.

" I did not think you'd be so soon," said Minnie as she shut
the door.

" Peste? What a climb! WThat for you live zo 'igh? "

" Fresh air. I saw him."

"Ah! An it is all right?"

"All right." Minnie took up a powder puff. Marie Le-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 213

tellier watched her critically for a moment, and then espying
the open trunk, began to rummage. She herself was already
dressed for the evening. Her black jacket was open, showing
a sheer voile blouse with a blone net collar carried almost up
to her ears. Minnie heard the soft creak of her corsage as she
stooped and lifted some garments. Clapping her hands together
to rid them of powder, Minnie came over and took out the
blouse she intended to wear. Unlike Madame's it was buttoned
in front, for Minnie had never been able to afford a maid, and
details like that are important.

" Ver' nice ! " commented her friend, eyeing the smooth
handkerchief-linen material of snowy whiteness. " How
much? "

" Bon marche. Twenty francs," was the reply, as Minnie's
small fingers slipped the big pearl buttons into place and settled
the waist.

" Too much. I make that for ten shillings."

" Oh well ! I could make it, but look at the fag."

"Eh?"

" Too much trouble ! " And Minnie proceeded to fix the soft
loose collar and blue sailor's knot. She fastened it with a broach
made of three sovereigns soldered to a back-plate, a notable
example of ornament and utility combined.

" There," she said. " Now I'm ready. Do you know I'm
supposed to be going back to Antwerp."

" Yes ! " Marie Letellier drawled the word, as she stared up
at Minnie from the trunk. It was evident from that drawl that
she understood Minnie's statement in its entirety. " He like
you ver' much? "

Minnie's mind reverted to her musings on Captain Briscoe's
dilemma, and she smiled as she said that such was the case.
The Frenchwoman regarded her with fresh attention — and re-
spect. Minnie, then, could do that, hold a man in invisible fet-
ters of steel and — let him go ! There are no students of applied
psychology like the women of the half-world. It is the chief
subject in the Didascalion I have mentioned, and Marie Letellier
was proficient in it. As her bright brown eyes scanned the other
woman standing there, slim, sweet, and cool, a film of envy crept
across her eyes, for she herself was thirty years old and she
could not forget it.

Minnie broke into her musings with a bundle of used things

214 CASUALS OF THE SEA

which she flung into the trunk and brought down the lid with
a bang.

"Where are we going?" she asked, picking up her hat.

" Folies Bergeres," said Marie, pulling her blouse down and
going over to the dressing-table. " Zere is an Inglish company
zere. Ver' good ! "

IV

THE Channel was as smooth as glass as the two women,
heavily clad, leaned on the lee rail and talked earnestly
together. They were travelling second-class, and the
stuffiness of the cabin had driven them out on deck.
At intervals they could see a light flashing on the English shore,
and Minnie, while she listened to her friend's story, kept her
eyes on the grey line now coming into view, waiting for the flash.
She was trying to understand why Marie Letellier, the cool,
experienced woman who had so thoroughly enjoyed her evening
at the Folies Bergeres, was confiding the story of her early life
to one she had met so recently. It was a sad story, Minnie ad-
mitted, containing elements of drama which her own lacked,
and it was told with an intensity she herself could not compass.
Marie had been at school near Paris and had been allowed
leave to visit friends in the City, where she had met and loved
an Englishman. He had persuaded her to marry him, and she
had gone back to school with their secret locked in her breast.
And then each week-end she had gone to Paris, ostensibly to
visit her friends as before, but really to her husband's flat.
With a certain Gallic verve Marie conveyed to Minnie the fear-
ful joy of that period, and Minnie's hands tightened on the
gunwale as she figured it. And what had happened? Well —
the voice of Marie dropped to a whisper — one night she had
wakened for some reason, and needing a drink tried in vain to
rouse her husband. She shook him, in vain, for he was dead.
Ah, mon Dieu! And then the temporary paralysis of brain,
the sudden decision, the flight back to school, the subsequent
illness and removal home. Her life, Marie insisted, had been
blasted, though Minnie, with her lack of imagination, could not
see it.

To her the Frenchwoman's tragedy was of her own making,
the product of sentiment and a love of theatricality. If not,
why had she become what she was? Why had she not remained
by the dead man's side and faced the thing out? Minnie could
not understand. She stood there watching the great light under

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216 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Beachy Head flash out nearer and nearer, stood there in the
pride of health and clear intellect and perfect nerve-poise, un-
able to feel the throb of remorse in her companion's voice. And
the Frenchwoman felt this and was awed. To each of her loves,
however evanescent, however mercenary, she gave something of
herself. With each passion virtue went out of her. But with
this English girl it was different, apparently. To her it was
the man who gave, more even than he knew. For all the dif-
ference it had made to her soul, she was as virginal as when
she worked at the factory in North London. " I need you,"
Anthony Gilfillan had said to her, and so said they all. For
her, she had no need of them, they could go or stay, which per-
haps explained why they often stayed. Marie, gaining intui-
tively some inkling of this fundamental fact, shivered.

" You zink I was a fool ? " she said.

" No, no," said Minnie, taking her arm and walking to and
fro. u Most people think J am a fool. I can't — I can't feel
that way."

The syren let out a long, wailing cry which ended in a shriek.
Minnie looked up and saw the dark figures striding to and fro
on the bridge. She thought of Captain Briscoe, and remembered
how he came down one night, his face wet with spray, and how
she had seen the hard bright glitter of command in his eyes
soften when he saw her curled up on the locker. Men! They
needed her.

" I think we're going in now," she said.

IT was late in April of the same year when Minnie, seated
by their window on the first floor in Lower Sloane Street,
put down the morning paper and watched the postman
crossing the road. For over two months she had been
with Marie Letellier, and as yet that woman of perfect figure
and imperfect saintliness had failed to fathom her. And indeed
Minnie did not quite understand herself. Accepting the French-
woman's offer of tuition, she had endeavoured to make her work
a success. This was hardly in the tacit contract which lay be-
tween them. The two assistants, heavily coiffured girls from
Walham Green and Streatham, were nonplussed by the incon-
gruity of her calm air of superiority and the bungling incompe-
tence of her work. Minnie ignored them and smilingly caressed
her friend, who deplored such a turn for prudery, and visited
her favourite resorts alone or with less intimate friends. And
yet she made no suggestion that Minnie should withdraw from
the atmosphere of the genteel half-world. For she had con-
ceived an affection for the cold English girl who took her oc-
casional outbursts of emotional excitement without rancour, and
had such a fund of quiet counsel and ironic wisdom.

Yet Minnie would have been at a loss to explain in measured
phrases why she retreated from the further pursuit of the exist-
ence she had followed for four or five years. She would not
have admitted that Captain Briscoe's letter, forwarded her from
the " Three Pigeons " had influenced her so far. For he had
written, thinking her still there, regretting his behaviour and
asking if he might see her again. She had sat for a long while
thinking over that letter, and wondering whether she had the
courage to answer it or just let him drop out as he proposed
to do. And she had answered it frankly, telling him how she
had changed her plans and come to London, that she supposed
they would be hardly likely to meet again, but expressing no
displeasure at the possibility. And then had followed the blink
silence usual when one corresponds with those who follow the

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218 CASUALS OF THE SEA

sea. All her worldly knowledge, all her common sense, told her
that he had vanished. She did not disguise from herself the
fact that she liked him, and liked him the better for his letter.
And, in spite of her worldly wisdom and her common sense, she
remained absorbed in needle and thread, and wondering at in-
tervals if she were a fool.

And now, on a morning late in April, she sat at the window
watching the postman cross the road. She did not have many
letters now. She had not told Mrs. Gaynor of her coming to
London. With this new leaven working in her mind, she had
grown a distrust of Mrs. Gaynor. When she wanted to see her
mother she would go to her direct, she decided. She had no
reason to suppose that she would have any letters to-day. Yet,
when Marie, in her bronze-green kimono and with a cigarette
between her lips, came back across the room with a letter in her
hand, Minnie saw the foreign stamp without surprise. She
opened it and read it calmly, while her friend, sinking into the
chair behind her, waited for news. Minnie raised her eyes and
met the Frenchwoman's gaze squarely.

** Yes, Marie, it is from him. What do you think of that? "

"He is comin' 'ere?" enquired Marie, and Minnie shrugged
her shoulders.

" That depends. He is coming to London."

"To you?"

"He says, to marry me. What do you think of that?"

" Mon Dieu ! " Minnie laughed.

" Not bad that ! You don't know him. He says he has an-
other ship, a bigger one, ' a command ' he calls it, with more
money and — and he says he loves me."

" But marry ! For why ? "

" I should like to get married," remarked Minnie, in a low
voice. " Very much."

" You ! For why ? " The voice was shrill.

" Children, kids, brats, whatever you like to call them. Don't
look at me like that, Marie; it's a fact I do. Don't you ever
want . . . want . . . oh ! " And Minnie opened her arms,
half-rose from her chair and sank back into quietness again.
Marie Letellier regarded her attentively, blowing thin spirals
into the air.

" 'E say *e love you, eh ? An' you ? "

" Yes," replied Minnie in her usual voice, folding up the

CASUALS OF THE SEA 219

letter. " He is a man. I don't know as I'm crazy about him,
but I have been feeling lately that I ought to make a change.
And that's what it all amounts to: I want a change."

And as she spoke she remembered her mother, resolving to
go and see her.

" An' you will leave 'ere? "

" I suppose so."

" Leave me 'ere all 'lone ? "

"Good Marie!" Minnie rose and put her hands on her
friend's shoulders. " When are you ever alone ? Answer me
that!"

And hard upon her reply to his agent in Billiter Lane, came
an impetuous telegram to be at a certain place at a certain hour.
She went out, a little late, and found him fuming. He took
possession of her, carried her in cabs to restaurant and theatre,
ordering wines and the delicate fruits of the earth, denouncing
the tyranny of female relatives in sailorly language, and damning
the world in general. Evidently he had been drinking, but
not deeply, and she saw with a certain satisfaction that he
scanned his change correctly. She took this surprising conduct
good-humouredly, appreciating to some degree the natural ela-
tion of a man raised from two to three thousand tons net register.
His new ship was a daisy, and she could have ten or twelve
pounds a month to keep house on. Now, would that be enough?
Because if not, damn him if he wouldn't draw on his account.
He wasn't going to have the dearest little, etc., etc. She cut into
his baby-talk with a hint as to the lateness of the hour and he
was all attention at once. There must be nothing indiscreet
now. He ordered the cabman to drive toward Sloane Street,
and as they passed through the solemn gloom of Eaton Square
he circled her finger with a ring, and abandoned coherence for
good and all. In Sloane Square she insisted gently that she
must leave him and alighted, ordering the hansom to return to
the " Three Nuns," where he was staying. She laughed to her-
self as she answered his farewell wave, and wondered why he
should choose a hotel with such an incongruous title. It reminded
her of the " Three Pigeons " in Rouen. That was absurd too.
Everything was finely absurd to-night. She felt the elation of
those who win though unaided. Her independence of soul had
remained immaculate. Once more she reflected with pride that

220 CASUALS OF THE SEA

a man needed her, and she had been successful in concealing her
own longings. After all, the fripperies of love, the flowers, the
lights, the implied sentiment of the ring were pleasant. With
a start she recalled that early affair with the coal-agent's clerk.
Had she dealt unkindly by him? Involuntarily she shook her
head. In the perspective of the years her cruelties, her uncon-
ventionalities, were but a part of life. He was probably happy
now with a girl whom he could understand. Her mother?
Well, there she admitted freely to herself as she undressed, that
there was something to be done. She had the sense to know,
and feel shame in the knowing, that her mother came out of this
business more bravely than she. She decided that she would
go and see her mother. The thought carried her on to a matter
of which she profoundly disapproved, and that was her mother's
dependence on Uncle George. She wondered if after these
years of separation she would be able to live with her mother.
Or better still, when she was married, why could not her mother
come and live with her? She was thinking of this as she fell
asleep, and it was not until next morning that she remembered
there was Hannibal. Little Hanny would be big Hanny now,
and she had no intention of taking him in as well. That was
a difficulty, and she decided to go down and see them.

For Marie Letellier she had but the flimsiest of compassions.
That emotional being regarded marriage much as a libertine
regards children, with a mushy sentiment, unstable and only
half-sincere. She had a habit of sighing when matrimony was
mentioned with an " Ah, not for me ! " expression on her face.
It was extraordinary how much comfort this capable woman
extracted from her early tragedy without ever permitting it to
hamper her practical everyday business of extracting money
from the world and his wife. It was this trait which extorted
Minnie's admiration. There was no earthly reason why Marie
Letellier should not be as respectable a widow as any other
dressmaker in southwest London; only her temperament forbade
it. Sensuality had for her the same fascination that sensuous-
ness had for Mrs. Wilfley. It is not too much to say that, had
they met, they could have fallen in love with each other. In-
deed, I have often wondered whether they did not eventually
collide, and I have figured the dishevelled Marie pouring her
terrible story into the ears of a lady with a note-book on her
knee, a lady who could not hold back her tears but leaned her

CASUALS OF THE SEA 221

head on Marie's shoulder and " sobbed like a little child," as
she herself told a reporter. And then I see on the bookstalls
among the best sellers a slim pale volume on whose cover is a
pierced and bleeding heart, and I read the title The Licensees
of Love. A card sticks from the pages informing me of a new
and enlarged edition just out, and as I hurry along the corridors
of subterranean London, I see posters — for Mrs. Wilfley will
be a person of importance then — posters showing her in her
best soul's awakening pose, raising a transfigured Marie Letellier
from a stern and rockbound sea. Nothing would please either
of them better than such publicity. It is quite possible that
Marie was the original of Mrs. Wilfley 's Magdalens of May fair,
published under the auspices of Lady Gophir in aid of her
Refuge. Popular taste had come round to Mrs. Wilfley 's way
of thinking, and as becomes an astute business woman she was
there with the goods. People wished to know how these poor
creatures to whom men paid the wages of sin (sometimes as low
as ten pounds a week) lived. Mrs. Wilfley knew and sold her
knowledge, sobs included, photos extra. We may even imagine
her drawing from the willing Marie the story of how she met
an English girl abroad (sensation in the Sunday papers !) and
induced her to come to London. Mrs. Wilfley would make a
good thing out of that.

The English girl, however, did not permit these considerations
to alter her purpose, and when Marie weakened to tears (this
was on Sunday morning, when most women of her class weep)
Minnie shook her.

" Do for goodness' sake be sensible," she remarked. " Any
one would think you had something to cry for. Marie, how
much money have you in the bank? "

" Tree — tree 'undred an' forty poun'," said Marie, lowering
her handkerchief.

" And the business ? And your health ? And plenty of
friends? And me only going round to Tedworth Square?"

" You will not see me when you marry ! " the huddled figure
in the bed announced gloomily. " I know ze Inglish madame.
You will spoil yourself."

" Fat lot you know, old girl. Get up and dress. You're
growing lazy."

Minnie met her gallant captain an hour later at Victoria Sta-
tion, where she instructed him in the ways of Sunday trippers

222 CASUALS OF THE SEA

to Brighton. He was, for all his million miles of ocean travel,
nearly as unsophisticated as a young man from the country.
The luxury of Pullman travel was new to him ; the plated fittings,
the telephone by which he ordered a whisky and soda for him-
self and a glass of port for her, the adjustable seat backs, all
excited his pleasure. He was one of those men, so common at
sea, who have really no idea at all of enjoying themselves except
in a disreputable manner. This manner with the years becomes
distasteful to them, they sink into themselves, grow morose and
taciturn, and the result is that bleak phenomenon, a merchant
skipper. Captain Briscoe had gone to sea when he was eleven
years old, and being now forty, had spent about sixty per cent
of his total existence upon the ocean. As the train fled away
through the smiling country that Sunday morning, he realised
how little of life's ease he had had. He was inordinately proud
of the woman at his side. Ah ! he knew an A 1 copper-bottomed
craft when he saw one! Now he would have a home of his own
and a dear darling little wifie, etc, etc. The reflections of a
sea-faring man are very much like those of a bank clerk or any
other man in the same position. Suffice it that Captain Briscoe
had the unusual experience of feeling himself a thoroughly re-
spectable engaged man and yet a bit of a dog for all that. He
had read of trips to Brighton, and here he was, travelling
Pullman and all the rest of it. After all he could afford it. He
had grown so accustomed to investing his money that he had
almost forgotten that he could afford it.

And coming back in the evening had been the capping of a
perfect day. It might be surmised that he, having spent so
many weary years at sea, would have no supreme emotion at
the sight of it from Brighton Pier. But Captain Briscoe's sea
was very different from the boat-flecked panorama which con-
fronted them at every turn, the gay esplanade, the music and
minstrelsy of the populous beaches, the toy breakers that rolled
lazily in the sunshine. At times he looked out at it grimly as
he remembered some particularly strenuous gale off Hatteras
or the joys of getting away from Valparaiso with the Norther
hard behind him. The memory gave the present a greater zest.

She told him in the train, as they returned to Victoria, of her
intention to visit her mother and her proposal to take her to
live in the flat in Tedworth Square.

" A very good idea ! " he agreed, pleased at the opportune

CASUALS OF THE SEA 223

appearance of a relative. It seemed to cut Minnie off from
her past life, for her to produce a relative. " But we aren't
goin' to live down there for long, eh? I thought of a place in
the country, with a few fowls and a pig. I always wanted to
be a farmer."

Sublime illusion!

-' Later on," she soothed him. " When you've retired."

" It's unlucky to talk about that," he reminded her. " No
seagoing man ever speaks about swallowing the anchor."

" Why do you call it that ? " she asked.

" Well, it's a pretty hard thing to do," he replied briefly,
and his blue eyes grew grave as he recalled cases to his mind of
men who had tried to do it, tried to fling from their souls the
terrible thrall of the sea.

" And the country's rather awful in the winter," she was
saying as the great yellow face of the clock-tower came into
view.

" That's right," he agreed. " London's not so bad after all.
It's a friendly place." And he really felt as though he were
coming home.

" It's home to me," she assented. " And there's another
thing, George. I've an idea I might make some money here."

He looked at her in alarm. What did she mean?

" It's like this," she explained. " When I was here, a long
time ago, I knew a woman who wrote things."

"Wrote things?" he repeated vaguely.

" I can't explain very well," she said. " I'm not sure it would
come to anything. But when I get settled I'm going to have
a try. I've been thinking."

He gazed at her in admiration. What a clever little woman
she was!

" There's no need for you to earn money," he declared
proudly. " / can do that. You leave it alone, whatever it is. I
want my wife to be a lady ! "

" It's not unladylike," she replied, " and we might as well
have as much money as we can get. I shall have a lot of time
on my hands."

" You can do sewing," he suggested jocularly, and her lip
curled.

" Not in my line," she returned coldly, " and there's no money
in it."

224 CASUALS OF THE SEA

She did not pursue the matter further at the time, for the idea
that had taken possession of her mind was indeed too shadowy
yet to put into words. 13ut it was true that she had been think-
ing, and as the future proved, thinking to some purpose. Often,
during the past few years, her thoughts had gone back to Mrs.
Wilfley and that lady's connection with publicity. Had she
missed a chance in not staying with Mrs. Wilfley? Too late
to bother about that now. But it had become a habit with her
to scan the papers and magazines that came her way, noting
the advertising matter and wondering if Mrs. Wilfley had written
it. Everywhere she would see whole pages devoted to the Gil-
fillan Filament, pages of glowing rhetoric framed in allegorical
designs by eminent artists. And then, in a reckless mood, she
had wondered whether she could not do " that sort of thing."
She had ideas, she was sure. If she could only get a start. . . .
That would take too much time, she had reflected, and put the
subject out of her mind. But now that she was going to be
independent, the idea had come back. She had experience of
life now. If another woman could do it, she could do it. But
since the man at her side did not like the notion, since in his
opinion it was unwomanly, she would say no more. She must
be a lady, do nothing. Very well. She would wait until he
was away at sea again, and then she would have a look round.

BOOK THREE
THE SEA

* To all whose souls are weary,

To all whose souls are sad
With piteous days or dreary,

To all whose hearts are glad
The great se"a's soul ha* spoken,

The great sea brings release,
And even hearts half-broken

Win something of Us peace."

MRS. GOODERICH sat near the carefully curtained
window of her house, or rather her one-third of
a house in Jubilee Street, E. The third consisted
of the use of the front passage, the ground floor
fronts, and a curious middle chamber, lighted by transoms, which
served as a scullery and coal-shed. The ground floor back was
ruled by an Irish woman from Cavan, who also washed for a
very respectable Bohemian family who disseminated themselves
over the rest of the house. The Bohemian family had evidently
seen better days, probably before Bohemia got its bad name;
they were astonishingly quick to see the respectability of Mrs.
Gooderich, who had curtains, and the impossibility of the Irish
woman from Cavan, who had none. They at once invested in
curtains, and there they were at the upper windows, the colour
being that sombre grey which is the London equivalent for white,
and providing for the Bohemian females an effective screen
behind which they could look down at life in Jubilee Street or
peer curiously across at the occasional excitement of a scuffle,
a fight, or an arrest in Assembly Passage. They tell me that
all this is changed now, that Jubilee Street is so congested with
respectable people that Irishwomen from Cavan and anarchists
from Oran are crying out, " No room to live! "; that Assembly
Passage is a Valley of Peace, and policemen no longer find it
expedient to patrol it in couples. It sounds Utopian and unreal ;
if it is true, who shall despair of the Ultimate Reclamation of
the World?

It was a bright and eager spring day and about half-past four
in the afternoon that Mrs. Gooderich sat near her curtains oc-
cupied with a book. For she had of late years discovered, some-
what to her surprise, that reading " took her mind off her
worries." Certainly she did not discover this while she had
such worries as her husband's death, her daughter's defection
from the Right, her elder boy's brief but glorious career in
South Africa, and the loss of her position as a home-keeping

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228 CASUALS OF THE SEA

woman. They had left her small time for reading; but now,
in the lull of the past four or five years, with no greater worry
than a somewhat unstable Hannibal, she had been led by Mrs.
Gaynor, be it said, to follow the fortunes of heroes and heroines
as described by certain masters and mistresses of Romance.
As she sits there, bending her head over her book, following
the words pointed out by her finger through spectacles that add
twenty years to her age, and whispering inaudibly to herself,
she is greatly changed from the dark-haired, blue-eyed little
creature who stood before the late Mr. Royce in his nice little
house in Caroline Road so long — well, twenty-four years ago.
And there is a change from the slightly hysterical widow who
stood facing her recalcitrant daughter that windy autumn day
in Mrs. Gaynor's front room. When a woman drops in social
position from two servants to one, or from one to a weekly char-
woman, her spirit is unbroken; she can brazen it out and defy
the neighbours to prove it isn't because she is independent and
prefers to do her own work. But when she ceases to be her
own servant and enters the service of another, when a thriving
brother-in-law, instead of leaving her to die in her indigence,
perpetuates that indigence by " putting her in the way " of a
debasing employment, then there comes a change in the outward
seeming. She can no longer brazen it out even to herself; a
terrible apathy becomes visible upon her. As she confronts you,
you see in her shoulders humility, in her hands unwilling respect ;
but in her eyes there slumbers an impotent anger, and her
mouth has the tremulous droop of despair.

Mrs. Gooderich read on in her romance, and as we see her,
she looks not unhappy. But ever and anon she looks through
the window and up Assembly Passage as though expecting a
familiar figure. There is no one visible in the Passage save
some four or five youths who are loitering near a blacksmith's
shop. As Mrs. Gooderich looks up she sees one of the boys
dart from the shop pursued by a tall and powerful old man in a
smith's apron. He clutches the youth by the shoulder, but quick
as lightning the lad twists his arms from the sleeves and follows
his companions in a wild stampede into Jubilee Street. The
tall old smith is left standing with the coat in his hand.

Mrs. Gooderich put down her book and stood behind the
curtains, an expression of pain on her shrunken features as she
looked out upon this scene. After a moment's hesitation, she

CASUALS OF THE SEA 229

went out and opened the front door. The youths were leaning
against the wall opposite laughing among themselves; the coat-
less one regarded with glances of admiration.

" Hanny! " called Mrs. Gooderich, and the youth turned, the
laugh dying away.

Come here ! " and he came, hands in pockets, dissatisfaction
on his face. "Where's your coat?"

" Lost it."

" I saw how you lost it. How often 'ave I told you to keep
away from that lot? You take no more notice o' me than if
I spoke to the lamp-post."

She closed the door and followed him into the room.

" You'll stay here while I go and speak to Mr. Gills," she
ordered, and she put on her hat with trembling fingers. " You
can't think how I hate to have to go to respectable people about
a tiling like that. It was bad enough when you got the sack.
You might behave yourself till you get something to do ! "

He tat sullenly in a chnir, hands in pockets, his feet spread
out with the heels dug into the floor. He remained in this
posture while his mother crossed the road and disappeared into
the blacksmith's shop. His liquid full brown eyes were clouded
with moody self-reproaching anger. He knew it was all wrong,
this tearing about the streets, this wanton pilfering and bell-
ringing. He ought to be at work. That was the respectable
thing for him, a great lout of nearly eighteen. But he had got
" fed up " with Cortington's Repositories, the devil of " lark-
ing " had led him too far, and on the previous Saturday the
foreman had given him his money. What would it all end in?
His mother with some asperity had told him he would go wrong.
The son of the Irishwoman from Cavan had gone wrong al-
ready, had stolen a watch one night in the Great Assembly Hall
and had got " pinched." The Bohemian family never had any
disgrace like that. With an almost uncanny facility they had
got themselves into divers occupations, living malodorously be-
hind their grey curtains, but with no breath of scandal ever
hanging about their stairway. WTith the lack of logic often as-
sociated with villainy, Hannibal disliked the industrious swarm
upstairs. Why didn't they stop in their own country, instead
of taking bread out of the mouths of Englishmen? This argu-
ment was not Hannibal's, of course, he had it from a man in the
Repositories, a man who had strong views about aliens.

230 CASUALS OF THE SEA

He was sunk in one of his sullen moods when his mother re-
turned and flung his coat over to him.

" It's gettin' past a joke! " she broke out at him, as she took
off her hat. " I'll go over and see your uncle at Kennin'ton to-
morrow morning, and see if he can't put you to somethin'.
Nothin' I say makes any difference. It's stealin', no less, what-
ever your beautiful friends call it."

He made no reply, but sat looking down at the floor.

She looked at him with attention for a moment.

" What's the matter with you, Hanny ? " she cried. " Why
don't you put your coat on ? "

" I'd no'," he grunted. " Can't 'ave a bit of a lark now."

" Bit of a lark ! To steal an honest man's iron so you can go
sell it in the Mile End Road and buy cigarettes? It's sort of
lark you'll get six months for, my boy, and so you would this
time if Mr. Gills weren't a gentleman."

" Oh, all right, all right. I ain't pinchin' 'is old iron all the
time, am I ? "

" You tell your uncle that."

" I ain't goin' to tell 'im anything. I ain't goin' to 'ave any
truck with 'im."

" Why not ? " demanded his mother, setting the table. Her
voice faltered, for she knew in her heart she agreed with the boy.

" Don't like him," growled Hannibal, getting slowly into the
coat. It is noteworthy and curious that the mute anger which
had flared into Minnie's eyes when she heard of her uncle's gen-
erous provision for her mother, had its counterpart in Hannibal's
untutored and undeveloped soul. And Mrs. Gooderich, lifting
her head to speak, felt the invisible power of this antipathy,
felt a responsive something in her own humiliated heart, and
was silent.

" Come and get your tea," she said at length. " I must be
off by half-past five." Hannibal drew his chair to the table and
began.

" What are you goin' to do ? " she asked. " I can't keep you
'ere eating your 'ead off." Hannibal squirmed in his chair.

" Give me a chance," he mumbled, his mouth full. " I'll 'ave
a look roun'." Mrs. Gooderich sighed.

It is due to her to say that she did not sigh from mere selfish
grief. She had never expected fortune to be particularly kind
to her; she had always been thankful that she was a respectable

CASUALS OF THE SEA 231

woman instead of a nameless derelict. She sighed because of
the apparent futility of her life, because she seemed so help-
less before her children. Minnie and Bert had simply ignored
her, and what was the result? Minnie was a lost one, a shame-
less denizen of the half-world whence she herself had been res-
cued in the nick of time. Bert, against her wishes, had gone
into the Army, had rushed gallantly to meet fate, and fate had
met him more than halfway in the shape of a Schneider shell
that had smashed him to a blackened pulp. There they were
on the grained and varnished wall behind her now, Minnie al-
most faded out of recognition, a demure damsel of fifteen, Bert
in a group of his chums, with their yellow uniforms coming out
badly in the photo, and their dog, who had moved and so seemed
to have two heads. Was she proud of her soldier-son ? Who can
say, since she never spoke of him? Nor can we speak with ex-
actitude of her feelings towards that wilful daughter now that
time had softened the hard .outlines of her wrongdoing.

And now little Hanny was growing insurgent too, and she
sighed as she cut the bread and spread it with margarine. Lit-
tle Hanny, who was a head taller than his mother, ate without
speaking after his appeal for a chance. He ought to have some
one to look after him in the evenings, but what could she do?
It was sometimes nine or half-past before she had finished in
the City. She had tried to get him to " go in " for something
at the People's Palace, but Hannibal was not that kind of a lad.
The Bohemian family took to the People's Palace with avidity,
lapping up knowledge in the classes and developing their Slavonic
muscles in the gymnasium from September to May, another ex-
ample of alien presumption. But not so Hannibal. Later on,
as we shall sec, he acquired the reading habit, with disastrous
results, but for study and the social fidgets he had no facility.
Behind the Bohemian curtains there was a silver shield, won
by the juvenilia for athletic*, and on the mantelpiece they
snowed their friends with pride an ormolu clock, the reward of
the second daughter for swinging Indian clubs for an unheard-of
time. Mr. Gills's little boy, even, a precocious Christian of
five-and-a-half, had sung a solo at the Assembly Hall, which,
so it was rumoured, had brought sinners staggering to the peni-
tent form. Hannibal had shown no signs of eminence in any
department of life. He himself was dissatisfied, though it is
not in youth to admit it. The natural prankishness of adoles-

232 CASUALS OF THE SEA

cence had led him away from those strange dreams of his child-
hood, those dreams in which he saw the phantoms come and
go, and Cortington's Repositories were no place to dream in.
Cortington's Repositories, in fact, were a pretty good miniature
of the whole world to Hannibal, being a dusty, noisy place, full
of other people's property. Hannibal was " fed up " with them,
which was equivalent to saying he was fed up with the world
as he found it. To dart into Mr. Gills's shop, seize an old file,
a hammer, a nail-head or a piece of bar-iron, vanish round the
corner into Jubilee Street, stroll through Stepney Green and out
into the Mile End Road, and bargain with the Russian Jew
who kept the second-hand tool and metal shop — well, it might
not be respectable, but oh! it was a blessed change from the
eternal expression of the Repositories. He was not a bad boy.
Had he been sent to Eton at thirteen and Balliol at eighteen
he would have turned out an admired specimen for the govern-
ing-classes, though he had no faculty for governing. Had he
gone to Merchant Taylors and passed into an old-established
business, he would have proved a fair though somewhat dreamy
junior partner with a taste for bric-a-brac and Persian Prints.
But he was none of these things. He had, according to the Log-
Cabin-to-White-House school, an equal chance with others to
become Lord Chancellor or President of the Board of Trade.
I do not think he had. As I have said, he lacked the vital spark
of heavenly flame which is indispensable if one is to become a
Lord Chancellor of a kingdom, President of a Republic or a
Captain of Industry. He had nothing of the sublime genius
of a Lipton, a Roosevelt, or an Alfred Jones. While in the Re-
positories he had no hair-raising schemes for economising the
expenses of storing pianos, no heaven-born invention for simpli-
fying the work and so throwing half the staff out of employ-
ment. He has given the biographer, so far, very little material
for rhetoric. Lacking the genius for making opportunity, he
had had none. Evidently he has no turn for Greatness. The
Bohemian family have long since outstripped him in the race, one
of them even attaining to Cambridge and a wranglership. Some-
thing must be done with him. Mrs. Gooderich travelling City-
ward on the Aldgate train is wondering. Hannibal himself, as
he lounges along the Mile End Road, is wondering. Possibly the
reader, if he has survived so far, is wondering too.
Let us see.

II

IT was just eleven o'clock next morning that Mrs. Goode-
rich, pausing in her efforts to tidy up the front room,
looked through the curtains and beheld Mrs. Gaynor and
her son Hiram pushing open the gate and approaching the
door of her home. Mrs. Gaynor's visits to her old friend had
not been very frequent. The difficulties in those days of trav-
elling from a northern suburb to Mile End Road were sufficient
to deter the most hardy explorer. You may go to Japan via Si-
beria at the present time with less anxiety and exhaustion.

" Well now, how are you? " said Mrs. Gaynor when the door
opened. " I dare say you didn't expect me, did you ? "

" No, I can't say I did," said Mrs. Gooderich, leading the
way into the front room. " What's brought you down here so
early?"

" Hiram," snid Mrs. Gaynor. " I was going down to see his
ship and I thought I'd make one journey of it and see you too."

Mrs. Goodericli looked at Hiram, who smiled pleasantly and
stood turning his cap over. He was dressed in the uniform of
the Merchant Service Apprentice, a double-breasted coat of pilot
cloth with big brass buttons, and his cap was adorned with gold
cord and a badge. His cheerful face was as brown as a berry,
as were his hands, which were big and muscular, the happy result
of much strenuous toil.

H He does look well," sighed Mrs. Gooderich, and Hiram's
mother regarded him with approval.

" Why don't you send Hannibal to sea ? " she asked, when they
were seated. " It 'ed do him a world of good."

" What can I do? " complained Mrs. Gooderich. " I thought
he was doin' well at the Repositories, and now they've discharged
him without a reference. He's so rowdy too, and he won't listen.
If I was to suggest anything he'd go against it for certain."

" That's so," assented Mrs. Gaynor. " That is so. I shouldn't
suggest it. Just pack him off."

" How! I don't know anybody. I'm sure I'd be very glad,

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234 CASUALS OF THE SEA

though I've no great fancy for a child of mine to be a sailor and
get drowned."

" We don't all get drowned, Mrs. Gooderich," said Hiram,
laughing. " I've been to sea two years and here I am safe as
houses."

" Yes, but you might. There's always a danger."

" So there is in the Cambridge Heath Road/' said Mrs. Gay-
nor. " I was nearly run over this morning."

Mrs. Gooderich smiled.

" One gets used to it — all this traffic — after a time."

** If you'd like to get Hannibal away on a ship, Mrs. Goode-
rich, I'll speak to the Skipper. He might know of a chance,"
said Hiram. " It's hard work though, and hard grub too.
P'raps he wouldn't like it? "

" I 'ardly know what to do," she replied wearily. " Where is
your ship ? "

" Surrey Commercial Docks."

"And there's Hannibal, isn't it?" exclaimed Mrs. Gaynor,
pointing with her umbrella. Hannibal was visible leaning
against the wall across the road, a cigarette in his mouth, con-
versing with another youth. Mrs. Gooderich bit her lip in her
anger as she went to the door and opened it. He saw her beck-
oning, and slouched across holding the cigarette so that it was
hidden in his sleeve.

" Throw it away," she said quietly. " Here's Mrs. Gaynor
and Hiram. They want to see you." Hannibal, flinging away
the sodden mess, took off his cap and followed his mother into
the room.

" Why, Hanny, you're as big as Hiram ! " cried Mrs. Gaynor,
who forgot for a moment the intense dislike young people have
of all references to their growth. Hannibal stood uneasily shift-
ing from one foot to the other.

" Goin' away ? " he managed to remark to the trim young
sailor, who nodded cheerfully.

" We were just saying, Hanny, that you might do well at sea,
too," suggested Mrs. Gaynor.

" Me ! " said Hannibal, eyeing the pilot-cloth and the gold
buttons.

"Sure, you. Why not?"

Hannibal was silent. This was a new idea, and neither he
nor his mother were adepts in dealing with new ideas.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 285

" Blow'd if I know," he replied at length. " 'Ow d'you get
a job to start?"

" You ought to be apprenticed/' said Hiram.
" P'raps his uncle would help him/' suggested Mrs. Gaynor.
There was another silence which Mrs. Gooderich relieved.
" I'll see him/' she said, but she spoke reluctantly.
" Wouldn't you like to come down and see the ship with us ? "
asked Mrs. Gaynor.

"If you like," replied Hannibal, looking at his mother. " I'd
better 'ave a wash."

While Hannibal was having a far from unnecessary scrub in
the scullery, Mrs. Gaynor took a letter from her bag and handed
it to her friend.

" From Minnie," she said briefly, and sat silently while Mrs.
Gooderich got her glasses and read it.

" She's comin' 'ome," she said, handing it back.
N To London," replied Mrs. Gaynor. " Will you see her? "
"If she comes to see me I can't turn her out. But do you
think for a moment she'd come 'ere? She isn't like you, Mrs.
Gaynor. She's a fine lady, lives on the best, I dare say. She
won't come down 'ere, I'm quite sure."

" You see ? " said Mrs. Gaynor, looking over the letter. " She
speaks of going into some business with this friend of hers. It
may be — a change."

" It would be — if it was honest. No, she'll come to me when
she's sick and got no money, not before."

" Mrs. Gooderich, I don't believe she would," said the Amer-
ican woman earnestly. " I think she's too much pride."

" You mean she'd be ashamed of seein' her mother livin' down
here? I dare say. Gels like her 'ave plenty of that sort o'
pride."

" Well, we'll see, and I'll let you know when she writes to me.
We must be charitable."

" Oh, I'm very charitable," assented Mrs. Gooderich with
unwonted waspishness. " I can afford to be, in my posi-
tion."

And then Hannibal returned, and Mrs. Gaynor switched the
conversation away to literature. Mrs. Gaynor, while admitting
the genius of Augusta Wilson, thought Mrs. Southworth her su-
perior in novel-writing, and it was that lady's Ishmael which
Mrs. Gooderich had been reading.

236 CASUALS OF THE SEA

"How do you like it? Isn't it a great story?" asked Mrs.
Gaynor.

" Beautiful/' agreed Mrs. Gooderich. " He does marry that
Countess, I s'pose ? "

" Sure, and the poor thing he'd married in secret dies.
Haven't you got to it yet ? "

" No. I read so slow/' admitted the widow. " I was won-
derin' if the Countess 'ed get him, and then I couldn't think how
he'd manage with the wife he had."

" She dies/' repeated Mrs. Gaynor solemnly.

" That's the best of stories," remarked Mrs. Gooderich.
" You can always let them die if they're in the way. It's dif-
ferent in real life."

It is.

Hannibal had washed his hands and brushed his hair and boots,
and now appeared ready for the expedition.

" Will you be back to dinner ? " asked his mother.

" I'll see to that," said Mrs. Gaynor. " Hanny'll have to es-
cort me back to the City. The ship don't sail till to-night, but
I'll have to be getting back this afternoon."

" I'll be out a bit, so if he's not to be back at dinner-time I
needn't hurry."

" Not a bit o' need. You go right along and do the errands.
Hiram, where's that — oh, here, it's in my bag." And Mrs. Gay-
nor placed a pot of her home-made j am on the table. " Vic-
toria Plum. I hope you'll like it. Now we must be getting
along."

They got along, and Mrs. Gooderich, looking through the cur-
tains at them as they walked towards Stepney Green, noted with
a certain satisfaction that Hannibal was bigger than Hiram,
and would no doubt look as well if he had the same uniform.
This brought her back to the half- formed decision which had
led her to hint she might be out for a while. Should she go
to see her brother-in-law, Mr. Brown, and ask him to assist
her in sending Hannibal to sea? There was much against it.
She did not like either the idea of the sea or the idea of asking
her brother-in-law's help. But was it not her duty? That was
the worst of Mrs. Gooderich. She never knew whether any
course of action was her duty or not. As a rule, when she did
an unpleasant thing, it was not because she was convinced it was
her duty, but because she was afraid it might be. It was in this

CASUALS OF THE SEA 237

mood that she made her way, after an early dinner, towards
Kennington. She would ask her brother-in-law's help, he would
very likely decline; she hoped he would; she would have done
her duty and would then proceed to do something which was
not her duty, namely, leave Hannibal to get some casual employ-
ment.

The curious thing is that Mr. Brown and his family were
quite unconscious of any reason why Mrs. Gooderich should not
accept assistance at their hands. Mr. Brown was still the man
with the humorous blue eye who had stayed the funeral cortege
at the " Northern Star " and regaled himself with pork-pie and
stout. He was more successful, that was all. He had got on.
From a slippery little ledge on the lower slopes of the moun-
tain, after a period of peril so terrible that only a single rope
held him dangling over the Bankruptcy crevasse, he had reached
a narrow path which led each year higher and higher. That
dangle on the rope had greyed his hair, but it had not destroyed
his sense of humour. He had no pride at all in the sense that
Mrs. Gooderich understood pride. He would have puzzled in
vain to know why his sister-in-law was reluctant to be under any
further obligation to him. He had gone out of his way to get
her recommended for the work of cleaning those offices in the
City, he had got her that quite desirable third of a house at a
ridiculously trivial rent. What could he do?

But as a matter of fact, Mr. Brown was too busy getting on
to do any puzzling at all. He understood his business, and now
that he had ceased to dangle and had good solid rocks under
his feet, he took a great pleasure in increasing his business and so
gave his sister-in-law very little thought. It may be that this
was one of the reasons why she was loath to ask more of him.
The widow and the fatherless are very quick to discern whether
your sympathy be perfunctory or really from the heart. They
have no business to be so fastidious, seeing who they are, but
the fact remains that a poor foolish widow like Mrs. Gooderich,
and a poor ineffective orphan like Hannibal, will have more pride
than a prosperous builder like Mr. Brown, who really could af-
ford to be stuck-up.

It could hardly be expected that Mrs. Brown, who was so
helpless an invalid in the old days that she had to drink port
and oatmeal stout, would be any better now that her husband had
got on. She was not. She had grown steadily worse until noth-

238 CASUALS OF THE SEA

ing but Bournemouth and Heidsieck could keep the breath in
her body. It was a great relief to Mrs. Gooderich to know that
she was not called on to meet Mrs. Brown. There is bound to
be patronage and stubborn resentment in such encounters be-
tween sisters-in-law until humanity is scrapped and made over
afresh. The daughters were much more bearable, Mrs. Goode-
rich thought, they being quite unaffectedly pleased with their
prosperity and glad to see their aunt.

The neat bow-windowed house, with its little office built out
at the side, was in one of the many turnings off the Kennington
Road. As Mrs. Gooderich came up to the gate, Mr. Brown was
standing in the way leading to his yard at the back, talking to
his foreman. He did not hasten out to bid her welcome, though
he was glad to see her. He just waved his hand and waited for
her to come up to him. Another piece of presumption and fool-
ish pride; the widow resented it.

" Well, Mary, how's things ? Come over to see us ? "

"Yes, George, I thought I'd just run over and have a word
with you. How are you all ? "

"Oh, fairish. The missis is just as usual. She goes out in
a bath chair a bit, y'know, but she don't seem to get any stronger.
Beef-tea an' Bengers, an' a glass o' champagne. Nothin' else
yet, doctor ses."

" An' the children ? " Mrs. Gooderich began to be sorry she
had come. It seemed more difficult than ever to ask a favour.

" A-h," replied Mr. Brown. " That reminds me of something.
But what's the trouble? You said you'd come over to 'ave a
word with me."

All this time he stood there in the yard entrance, his broad
body planted firmly on his great stout legs encased in black
leather leggings, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, and his
humorous blue eyes glancing over his little sister-in-law. She
had walked nearly a mile from the train and she looked round
vaguely as though in search of a seat.

" Well, I was thinkin', — but if you're busy "

" Not for a few minutes. Let's go indoors, and see Amelia,
she's somewhere roun'."

He led the way through the little office and into the drawing-
room.

The house, like most of those owned by people who have some
money but no pride, was rather over-furnished. It was scarcely

CASUALS OF THE SEA 239

safe to stand still in the drawing-room, so congested was the
space with goat-leg chairs, curio-cabinets, Chesterfields and
small tables. Everything was covered with photographs and
vases, the walls were reinforced with oil-paintings of sheep in
fields, enlargements of the family-portraits in colours, and plush-
framed mementoes of Margate, Bournemouth, and Ilfracombe.
Mr. Brown pointed to a straight-backed chair and settled him-
self in the Chesterfield.

"Amy!" he called, adding to Mrs. Gooderich, "She'll be
down in a minute."

She was down in less than a minute, and so was Ethel. They
had seen their aunt from a bedroom window and had lost no
time in changing their blouses and repinning their hair. They
entered together, two buxom well-looking young women, and of-
fered their cheeks to be kissed.

" How are you, Aunt ? " said Amelia.

" How are you, Auntie? " said Ethel. Then they patted their
hair, glanced at their reflections in the overmantel, and sat down
carefully.

" Now to business," said their father. " What was it you
wanted to see me about?" It occurred to him as he sat there
that it was delightful to do any one a good turn, especially a poor
relative.

" It's about Hannibal. I've thought of sendin' 'im to sea."
" Sendin' 'im to sea ! " repeated Mr. Brown in consternation,
and his daughters repeated the words —
" Sendin' 'im to sea ! "

Mr. Brown was British to the backbone, and he had the Brit-
isher's horror of the sea, but his astonishment was not merely
at the idea. To think that his sister-in-law had hit on such an
extraordinary scheme! And he said the words again, quite un-
able to frame any other comment for the moment.
" Sendin' 'im to sea ! "

" Yes," replied Mrs. Gooderich in a low, nervous voice. " You
see, I was talkin' to Mrs. Gaynor the other day, an' her boy's

doin' well on a ship, an' — an' — so "

" Did she give you the idea ? "

" We thought it might be a good thing," faltered the widow.

" And leave his job? "

" He left it last Saturday."

"Sacked?"

240 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Some little thing. . . . He's been there eighteen months/'
flared the mother, defending her son, her heart sinking.

" Fancy ! " breathed the two sisters, watching their aunt with
the unwinking gaze of young women destitute of pride.

"Any reference?"

" The foreman was that short I had no chance — they won't
listen to a woman," she muttered.

" Well — and so, what is it you wanted — my advice ? "

"I — Mrs. Gaynor thought you might be able to — to get him
on a ship."

Now this was, in all justice to Mr. Brown, a most unreason-
able request. Mr. Brown knew as much about ships as he knew
about the Differential Calculus. He was as far from the ship-
ping world as he was from Mahomet's Paradise, and he felt ag-
grieved that his sister-in-law should show such ignorance of life
as to expect anything else.

" Get 'im on a ship ? Why, Lord bless me, Mary, you 'aven't
took leave of your five senses, 'ave you ? "

" I didn't think it 'ed be much use," she said. " I told Mrs.
Gaynor it wouldn't be any use."

Ethel looked at Amelia and Amelia framed the word " Fib."
And Ethel nodded.

" I should think not. Why — why — if Mrs. Gaynor's so fond
o' the sea, why don't she do somethin' for 'im ? "

" They've only got one ship, she said, and they don't take many
boys. An' there's a premium too."

"That's it, is it? Me to pay the premium? For a boy as
gets the sack an' no reference. Mary, Fm surprised."

He was. He hadn't a particle of pride, but he was surprised
that a widow woman who was glad to take a sovereign a week
for cleaning offices, should have dreamed of an apprenticeship
for her boy. Young John was in the engineering and costing a
pretty penny in books and keep, Ethel had served an intermit-
tent novitiate at the gentle art of winding wire round flower
stems and making up buttonholes and wreaths. But Amelia had
faced life unflinchingly behind a tobacconist's counter, and Tom,
his beloved Tom-tom, the right-hand man of his business, he
had never had no apprenticeship. True, Mr. Brown had been
dangling by a rope at that time, with but few thoughts to bestow
on any of them, and Tom had proved one of those adaptable
mortals who can see money in anything and can extract it without

CASUALS OF THE SEA 241

fuss. But what has all this to do with the case of the widow who
sits on that straight-backed chair? By what law, human or di-
vine, can she lay claim to such a start for her boy?

As Mr. Brown himself said sot to voce when a liner was
wrecked and all the survivors were saloon passengers : " What's
the use of goin' first-class, if the steerage stand as good a chance
as you do ? "

He was not proud, but he could not see it.
Mrs. Goodcrich rose.

" It don't signify — I thought very likely you wouldn't fall in
with the idea."

" Well, hold on a bit — sit down — we've got something to
say first," said Mr. Brown. " It's really Amelia's business and
she can tell you." Mr. Brown peered through the thick screen
of plants, gold fish, and curtains which obscured the window.
" I see Tom's out there with a man I want to speak to."

He went out, and the two girls sat looking at their aunt for a
few moments. And then Amelia began to explain.

" The fact is," she remarked, with numerous little feminine
movements, " I've had a little legacy left me. You didn't know
our Uncle Bartholomew, did you, Auntie? He wasn't really
uncle, only a cousin o' dad's. Well, anyway, he took a fancy to
me when I was little, and what does he do but leave me some-
thing in his will."

" I've 'eard of 'im, Amy. He 'ad 'ouses, I think."
" No, property," corrected Amelia gravely. " But he didn't
leave that to me." She tittered and looked at her aunt as if
to say, " I shouldn't be wasting my time talking to you if I'd
been left real property." " No," she went on, " this little legacy
is the unexpired lease of a shop in Billiter Lane. Goodness
knows how he got 'old of such a thing, but I expect it was a
bad debt — it generally is. It's a hosier's business now; the
old gentleman used to pay a man to run it. Now he's gone and
left it to me. I'm not goin' to pay a man thirty shillin' a week
to make a pound profit. You see ? So we had a sale and cleared
it out."

" What are you goin' to do? Let it? "

" The lease has only four years to run and any tenant 'ed
want alterations no end. So I'm goin' to get dad to fix it up as
a tobacconist's, which is a business I know something about, and
look after it myself. Dad's great on shop-fittin'. He says

242 CASUALS OF THE SEA

there's a fortune in it. But I told him he wouldn't make any for-
tunes out of me 'cause he was to do it cost price."

" I see," said Mrs. Gooderich because she didn't see.

" So that brings me," continued Amelia, " to the reason I'm
tellin' you all this. You know where Billiter Lane is ? "

Mrs. Gooderich shook her head vaguely, and both sisters sat
with pursed lips. They were very patient and good-tempered
about it, but Aunt Mary was slow.

" Well, it's off a turning this end o' Fenchurch Street."

" Near Aldgate ? " said her aunt, now thoroughly cowed. The
two girls nodded.

" Well then, it's not so far from your place, and I was thinkin'
that as I couldn't be tied hand and foot I'd have to have an
assistant. An' so, to keep it in the family, it struck me Cousin
Hanny 'ed find it a good opening. Not much to start, of course,
but in time he'd get on, and it's much more gentlemanly work than
a furniture warehouse. Don't you think so ? "

" Oh, yes, Amy, yes, my dear. It's very good of you. You'd
teach him the business, you mean? "

" I'd teach him the business," assented Amelia, seizing a fresh
point of view with the quickness of a lightning flash. " Free of
charge, and he can open the place in the morning and close it up
at night."

" Oh, you won't be livin' there? "

Amelia closed her eyes in mute despair, and then looked ap-
pealingly towards her sister, signalling to her, " Do you think it's
any wonder she's poor? "

" Aunt Mary," she said, " do you know the rents in Billiter
Lane?"

Aunt Mary shook her head sadly.

" Well, for a room no bigger'n this one you're sittin' in, they
get five pounds a week ! "

M Good gracious ! "

" I should think so ! My place is only half as big as this, and
I could get three pounds a week for it if the lease had any time
to run; but as soon as people know it's up in four vears they're
off."

" I see," remarked Mrs. Gooderich. " Hanny could walk, I
should think."

"If he's got legs," agreed Amelia amiably. " I suppose he
has the usual number."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 243

" Here's father comin' in again," remarked Ethel.

She was two years younger than Amelia and always under-
took the irrelevant remarks. " Isn't it a lovely day? " she en-
quired of her aunt. It was a lovely day to the two girls, no
doubt, but I don't think that, so far, it had impressed Mrs. Goode-
rich as being very lovely. So she only smiled weakly and looked
up at her brother-in-law.

" Well, how is it now ? " he asked, taking the Chesterfield again.
" What do you think of Amy's idea ? "

" I think it'll do very nicely," replied Mrs. Gooderich. " It's
very good of Amy to give 'im a chance."

" To learn the business," added Amelia, with a look at her
father which was at once accepted, answered, and filed for refer-
ence.

" Bit better'n goin' to sea, I reckon," he suggested, with a
smile. " I suppose," he added, " I suppose he'll take it on,
won't 'e?"

" Oh, yes. I'll speak to him about it as soon as I get 'ome."

" That's the style," he replied, looking meditatively at the
small bent figure and thinking about an investment he had had
on his mind for some time. A successful man, or even a man
achieving success, has many things to think of. " That's the
style. It'll make a man of him. Let's see, 'ow old is 'e now ? "

" Eighteen nex' birthday," said the mother. The two girls
looked at each other for a moment. They had not realised that
even poor people grow up. It is very presumptuous of them, but
they will do it. Not even " stunted," according to slumming
rules, for Mrs. Gooderich added, " An' big for 'is age."

" It must be two years since he was 'ere," mused Mr. Brown.
" 'E was only a lad then."

" 'E's been runnin' up," she explained apologetically.

" You ought to bring 'im over sometimes," he told her, and she
made no reply to this except to rise once more.

" That's not the time ? " she asked, looking at the gilded clock
which had stopped at half-past five three weeks before. Mr.
Brown looked at his gold watch.

" Three," he said, clicking the lid and polishing it with his
thumb. " Just three."

" I must be goin'," said Mrs. Gooderich, holding out her hand.
He took it heartily.

" Well, bye-bye. Let Amy know as soon as you can,"

244 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Yes. Good-bye, Amy. Good-bye, Ethel."

As their aunt was passing through the hall, Ethel looked at
Amelia and Amelia shook her head.

" Take care o' yourself," was Mr. Brown's remark as he closed
the door.

" Eighteen ! " exclaimed Ethel, when the little servant had
brought the girls their tea up to their snuggery. Amelia stirred
hers meditatively.

" He may be a handful," she remarked. " It's plain he's too
much for her to manage."

" She never said a word about Minnie."

" It's not likely, is it?"

Ethel's eyes were round with interest as she stared at her
sister. She was growing up and approaching the time when
Amy would confide fully. She knew in a vague way that Aunt
Mary had a past, and she knew in a way somewhat less vague
that Cousin Minnie had, so to speak, a present which would ulti-
mately develop into a lurid subject for non-primitive young la-
dies to discuss. But as she stared at her sister, Amelia took
up her novelette and resumed her perusal of the adventures of
a poor heroine who had been wronged. So Ethel resigned her-
self patiently to a little more waiting, and continued her initia-
tion into womanhood by taking up her own novelette, which
treated of the adventures of a fascinating widow who visited
country houses, broke guardsmen's hearts and stole diamonds.

Ill

AS Mrs. Gooderich hurried home she had a great fear
gripping her heart, a fear that transcended all her
feelings of sadness and jealousy which had been
aroused by the visit to her successful brother-in-law.
It was the fear that by foolishly letting Hannibal go to see
Hiram's ship, she had spoiled the chance of getting him to fall
in with the new scheme. For Mrs. Gooderich, in spite of her
reluctance to accept favours from Kennington, was heart and
soul in sympathy with the commercial career as compared with
the nautical life approved by Mrs. Gay nor. What if Mrs. Gay-
nor had induced Hannibal to ship himself away immediately?
What if he were already tossing about on the ocean? Mrs.
Gooderich's ideas of maritime procedure were vague. And it
must be remembered that the sea was connected inseparably in
her mind with running away. The Mercantile Marine, she imag-
ined, was entirely manned by disreputable young fellows who
had done something and run away to sea. The Navy, of course,
was different. If you were in the Navy, you wore low-necked
jumpers, very baggy trousers, and appeared in your native vil-
lage at long intervals on leave with a bundle done up in a blue
handkerchief.

But Amelia's plan, apart from its Kennington origin, prom-
ised to be an admirable start in life. Mrs. Gooderich had never
heard of Napoleon's famous taunt. She would have seen noth-
ing libellous in it. She would have only wished we were a na-
tion of shopkeepers and she herself one of them. But while
in a general way you needed capital, in this case that terrible
difficulty was overcome. It was a fine idea, but all the way home
she had recurring fits of panic as she thought of Hannibal pre-
paring to run away to sea.

But Hannibal was there when she returned, still in his clean
collar and his hair not yet tousled. An unusually quiet and self-
contained Hannibal, who made no remarks of any importance
while his mother hastily prepared their tea.

" Did you see the ship ? " she enquired ; and he nodded.

245

240 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Is it a big one ? " And he nodded again.

" I've seen your uncle/' she told him nervously. " He says he
can get you a job."

" On a ship ? " he asked, turning round from the window.

" No. He says 'e don't know anythin' about 'em. It's a to-
bacconist's, in the City."

" Oh," said Hannibal, and resumed his contemplation of a
game of tip-cat in Assembly Passage.

" Your Cousin Amy's 'ad it left 'er, and she wants a lad to
look after it, open it and lock up at night, you see," she went on
hurriedly. " It's a good openin' to learn the business, as she's
been in that sort o' thing, so I thought — you'd better take it.
What's the matter? Why don't you answer? "

He turned on her again.

"Why do other people 'ave all the fat?" he asked hoarsely.
" Why didn't father git on same as Uncle George ? Nobody
leaves us tobacconist's shops, as could do with 'em."

" 'Ere's a chance to get on," she replied quietly.

" So they say ; 'ow much a week ? "

" I didn't ask. It wouldn't be much at first, till you'd learned
the business." He made no answer and she went on again.
" It'll be more'n you get at sea." He laughed grimly.

" It couldn't be less, old lady," he assured her, thinking of
Hiram's statement that he was in receipt of five shillings a week
until he was out of his time.

" There you are," she argued. " This idea of Amy's is the
chance of a lifetime, and you'd better take it. She may not ask
twice."

" I ain't ast her once yet," he replied in a low voice.

" What's the matter with you, Hanny ? "

" I'd'no. Some'ow I get fed up with it, seeing everybody else
'avin' a good time. Look at Hiram now "

" What does 'e get a week? " she asked.

"Get? He gets nothin'! Mrs. Gay nor 'ad to plank down
twenty quid to put 'im there, and they give 'im five bob a week
out of it. That's what I mean; 'e don't 'ave to earn anythin'.
And 'ere's Amy 'avin' shops left 'er. I git fed up with it, that's
all."

He sat sideways on his chair, staring moodily through the
grey curtains into the street, and struggling with a vague, form-
less desire, a desire that became in time a reincarnation of those

CASUALS OF THE SEA 247

purposeless imaginings of his childhood. Like many inarticu-
late souls, he was compelled to falsify his emotions by his ex-
pression of them. He did not really envy others for their good
fortune. What he felt was that at bottom he was unfitted for the
life in harness which seemed his only destiny. Whichever way
he looked he saw the collar of servitude and toil waiting for his
neck. And as he stood on the deck of the great, beautiful ship,
the white yards and endless complexity of her cordage soaring
above him, as he had stood there looking across at the great
steamers and caught, as it were, a hint of the vast heaving world
through which they had ploughed, a passionate hatred of his dul-
ness and impotence took possession of him. If he could only get
away out of it.

Hiram, showing him the berth he shared with another brawny,
brown-faced youth, had supplied in some sort an answer to Han-
nibal's hazy questionings. Hiram said that he might get a job
on a steamer as an ordinary, but the pay was poor and the
work was filthy. Or he might go — here Hirnm looked at his
chum who was twenty and smoked a pipe — he might go as a
steward.

" Me ! " scorned Hannibal. " I don't know nothin' o' stew-
ard's work."

" Mess room," said the pipe-smoker. " You soon get into it.
It isn't sailoring, I know, but it runs to a pretty good job later
on. Six or seven pound a month besides what the Old Man
gives you."

Hannibal looked at the speaker respectfully as he stood there
against the bunk, his muscular arms crossed, his brown face
clouded with the smoke of his briar.

" I'll think it over," he said. " How d'you get a job; just go
on board an' ask ? " And they nodded courteously. And then
Mrs. Gaynor, who had been talking to the captain's wife, came
along and said they must be off.

Hannibal often thought of that excursion down to another
world, a world of which Londoners least of all seem to have any
consciousness. And he remembered the journey up into the City
with Mrs. Gaynor. He was not very clear as to her meaning
sometimes, but he felt she was to be trusted. Mrs. Gaynor never
failed to give that feeling, even though you were antagonistic
to her. You could not for the life of you suspect her of advis-
ing some course for her own aggrandisement. And so, when she

248 CASUALS OF THE SEA

said to Hannibal in the 'bus, " Now, Hanny, you're the only one
left over to your mother now, so you must be a man and take
hold," he interpreted, " taking hold " as doing something for
his living at once.

" D'you reckon I could get on a ship — like Hiram? " he asked
hesitatingly.

" Why, I spoke to Captain Baines about it, and he said he
didn't know what he could do until the other apprentice is fin-
ished, and that'll be next voyage. But do you think you'd like
it? You see, your mother '11 be lonely all by herself."

" Same's you," he suggested.

" I'm never lonely," replied Mrs. Gaynor, her grey-green eyes
illumined by a curious light. " Your mother isn't like me, she
needs company. She's not like me, and you."

" Me ? Why me ? I ain't particularly fond o' bein' by me-
self."

As he uttered the words he realised that they distorted the
truth, that at bottom he despised his friends and their chivying,
and would have withdrawn to quieter haunts if the common crav-
ings of human life had been more rationally and adequately
sated.

Mrs. Gaynor had not answered him at first. She had sat there
in the 'bus leaning forward and grasping her umbrella and bag
firmly, thinking that though Hannibal was about the same age as
Minnie when they had gone for a little jaunt together, yet she
could not make Hannibal understand like Minnie.

" You used to be," she had said at length.

" Ah," he replied, looking out at the crowded street. " I used
to be a lot o' things I ain't now."

" You're running up," said Mrs. Gaynor, looking at him
earnestly, " and you'll soon be a man. And yet you have no
friends."

" I know a lot of chaps," he persisted, in spite of himself.

" I said friends, as Hiram and Harry Grantley are on the
Cygnet. I feel as safe as safe about Hiram since he's been to
sea, because he wrote and told me about his chum. Now, Hanny,
you ought not to grow up without a real chum."

" I'll do whatever you tell me," he declared. " Shall I go and
try for a j ob on a steamer, or stick 'ere in London ? "

" You must do what your mother thinks best. I don't be-
lieve she'd stand in your light, but all the same, Hanny, don't

CASUALS OF THE SEA 249

forget she's had a great deal to put up with, and try to make it
easier for her."

Hannibal was wondering why, if this green-eyed lady was as
rich as his mother surmised, she didn't dress better and offer to
pay his premium to indenture him to the sea ? But that was not
Mrs. Gaynor's way at all. She did a great and rare service to
the world by living in it; her influence made a great deal of differ-
ence to those who experienced it, and she felt that this subtle
psychic beneficence would have been vitiated by any traffic in
money. Hannibal, of course, did not know this ; he merely won-
dered, and came to the conclusion that Mrs. Gaynor was not so
very rich after all. Which was as near the truth as any one ever
attained.

Perhaps it was the result of that influence that he returned
home from his visit to the good ship Cgynet in a somewhat chas-
tened mood, which was only marred by the chafing effects of the
Brown family's success. When he made his statement to his
mother that he was " fed up," she put down the bread-knife and
came over to him.

'* Fed up? And don't you think I'm fed up with it too, long
ago? Do you think I want to go and take their leavin'? But
we can't starve. We've got to take what's offered. Beautiful
countesses don't come round with bags of money nowadays," she
continued bitterly, thinking of the novel she had been reading.
" And even if you've got relations as are well off, it's as bitter
as death to take it from 'em. What right 'ave we to pick and
choose ? "

" There y'are," he replied in a low tone. " That's just where
I bring up every time, and I'm gettin' sick of it."

Mrs. Gooderich was standing " over him," staring through her
curtains. She roused with a start.

"But you'll take it, Hanny?" She almost whined. "Don't
let them say we threw it back at 'em."

" Yes, I'll do as you like, old lady," he assured her, getting up
and going to the table. As he rose and towered over her, rump-
ling his hair with one hand while the other stretched out hori-
zontally, Mrs. Gooderich was struck by a new thought. She was
nearly strangled by the suddenness and the lunacy of it, but she
could not dismiss it.

" Hanny," she said, " when did you last see your Cousin
Amy?"

250 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Hannibal yawned again, and reaching out took a piece of bread
and margarine by the edge and dropped it flat on his plate. He
began his tea.

" I d'no/' he said, his mouth full. " Which is the oldest,
Amy or Ethel ? "

" Amy," said his mother, looking hard at him and still turn-
ing over her new lunatic idea in her brain.

M Ain't been there since I was at the Repositories," he said.
"Why?"

" Nothing," said his mother, and changed the subject.

IV

THE meeting was under the eye of Mr. Brown and there-
fore formal; Hannibal was somewhat tongue-tied and
conscious of his clean collar. But in spite of these dis-
abilities he made a favourable impression upon Amelia,
and Ethel, had she been yet further advanced in knowledge of
life, would have detected an unwonted softness in her sister's
face.

" Well, young man," said the humorous uncle, " you've been
takin' the law into your own 'ands lately. Chuckin' your job,
an' threatenin' to run away to sea ! Tut tut ! "

Young John, who was in the engineering and who therefore
was presentable to strangers at week-ends only, looked up at
this, and the story had to be retold for his benefit. He did not
seem so shocked as his father had been, seemed in fact more in-
terested in Hannibal than before.

Thomas, his father's Tom-tom and right-hand man, followed
his sisters, trying to make the young man feel as though he
were one of the family. They plied him with all the provender
of a high tea, for the Browns, having no pride, were still far
from that stage of success which is accompanied by late dinner.
The servant did not wait as yet, merely bringing in the food and
returning later to clear away. And Amelia, by whose side he
sat, was gracious and encouraging.

" Anybody 'd think I was a terror!" he laughed, when the
panic occasioned by so many dishes had passed from him. He
did not look like a terror as he sat there, his hair brushed up from
his forehead with a wet brush, the blinding light of three in-
candescent mantles descending upon him. The Browns were
still under the impression that their success should be demon-
strated to themselves by excess of light. They had worked up
from one mantle to three on the gasolier, with two (never used)
on either side of the fire-place. This greenish radiance dis-
turbed strangers and made the girls look plain, but they had not
yet attained to subtlety in such things.

Mr. Brown ate steadily with the appetite of a healthy and

251

252 CASUALS OF THE SEA

unembarrassed man, leaving his daughters to make the conver-
sation. This they proceeded to do after their own fashion.
The business of making Hannibal one of the family went on
apace.

" Have a little more tongue, Hanny ? " said Amelia, who was
hostess.

" Tom, pass the mustard," said Ethel, pushing the salt to-
wards her cousin, who was holding his plate for more tongue.

"Have you been to any theatres?" asked Ethel, who was
fond of them.

" Not much. I've been to the Paragon now and then."

u We saw the Sign of the Cross the other night."

"What's it like? I've 'eard of it."

" It's splendid ! So real, you know."

" Did you see it ? " Hannibal asked Amelia, and she nodded
seriously.

" It's a lovely piece. You ought to go and see it. It's always
on somewhere."

"What's it about?"

" Oh, the Christians in Rome, you know. It's very religious."

" Is that so ? Fancy ! At a theatre too ! "

" Clergymen go to see it," observed Ethel, looking into Hanni-
bal's cup. "More tea?"

" Thanks. I seen a piece called the Fightin* Parson once, but
I didn't see any clergymen there," remarked Hannibal.

" That's only a sketch ! " said Amelia, with a contempt diffi-
cult to imagine now. " The Sign of the Cross is quite different."

" I must see it," said the young man, wondering where he
would find the money to go to theatres.

" Aunt Mary doesn't like theatres, does she ? " enquired Ethel,
and Hannibal looked grave.

" No," he said, " she don't." He tried to imagine his mother
at a theatre and failed.

When tea was over young John offered Hannibal a cigarette.
Somewhat embarrassed he took it, knocking the end on his
thumbnail in a way that damned him as one experienced in ciga-
rettes. His cousin Amelia watched him lean over towards John's
match, and hoped it wasn't a vice with him. She had not been
prepared for a cousin quite so grown up as he had proved to
be; in fact her intended attitude of patronage would have been
impossible if Hannibal had been more sophisticated. She was

CASUALS OF THE SEA 253

half angry with herself for liking him, yet like him she did. He
had the full swimming eye that draws women, and though the
cigarette habit might breed trouble in a tobacconist's, it made
him seem more manly and — subtle point — independent of his
mother.

I have reiterated, perhaps to weariness, the lack of pride in
the Brown family, and it is a fresh demonstration of it that, so
far, they had not conceived any notions of consolidating their
position by means of advantageous marriages. The lady who
might have engineered any such campaign was on her back in
a Bournemouth hydro, entirely preoccupied with her own in-
terior and the stimulants which alone retarded dissolution.
Amelia and Ethel had no " fancy " idea which prevented them
from enjoying the society of "boys" of whose financial status
they were quite ignorant beyond their ability to pay for choc-
olates and seats in the upper circle. Ethel was still in the
engagement period, her clandestine attachments varying in dura-
tion from two days to a fortnight, with intervals of a week. It
may lower her in the reader's estimation, but it will certainly
convince him that she was not proud, when it is stated that for
the whole of the preceding September she had been engaged
simultaneously to a junior clerk at Bournemouth (cetat nineteen)
and a pattern-maker, a chum of John's, at Camberwell. The
temperament which survives, nay flourishes, on such quick-change
passion is the temperament most often found in families who
are getting on, who are healthy in body, active in mind, and who
find in the Sign of the Cross a sublime moral lesson for their
souls. Nothing can stop these people in their onward career;
they fill up every ditch as they go. They take no chances, are
prepared for every emergency. Does one part of the business
fail? They recoup one another. Is their house burnt? They
are insured. Does a great disaster overwhelm their investments?
Sons and daughters have each a calling and are at once earning
wages. This temperament needs no pride to bolster it, it shines
upon them and upon all their works as the incandescents glare
down upon their sumptuous high-teas.

Amelia, of course, as became a girl M-ho had a legacy, no
longer entangled her emotions so promiscuously as Ethel; and
it was characteristic of the Browns that she had no word of re-
proof for her sister. But Amelia had no particle of the snob-
bishness which would have led her to regard her poor cousin

254 CASUALS OF THE SEA

as so much East End dirt. The keen though unconscious pleas-
ure which she took in cowing her aunt had its origin in quite
another quarter. It had in fact two origins. One was Mrs.
Gooderich's stiffness — her pride in fact — when the Browns
were in the depths, and the other was Amelia's knowledge,
through her mother, of the circumstances that led up to Mary
Higgs marrying Amelia's Uncle Herbert. But the girl who
refrained from babbling of those circumstances to her sister was
not likely to let them affect her attitude towards the honestly-
born blood-relative Hannibal. Behold here another point in
the Brown breed. The good Berkshire blood which had gone
to water in Mrs. Brown was red enough in her children, and
carried with it a sane ethic which set a limit to the ostracism of
bastardy. For them a man honest in business was the noblest
work of God, but an honest woman was a frequent and gratifying
spectacle and nothing to make a song about. Ethel's indiscre-
tions ran not beyond sitting on a park seat with her lips glued
to those of the hour; but her father had no fear whatever that
she would overstep the somewhat elastic bounds of suburban
propriety. And for the very reason that they felt passion in
a healthily subordinated manner, they affected books and plays
wherein passion is a wild and murderous emotional debauch,
and regarded the Aunt Marys of life with piquant interest and
wide-eyed wonder at their foolishness.

Hannibal, therefore, as he and Amelia, followed by Ethel
and John, walked down the Kennington Road, lay under no ban
in his cousin's eyes. She found herself again and again speak-
ing without patronage. He, on the other hand, was discovering
the charm of untrammelled speech with a young and attentive
woman. It is encumbent upon us to acknowledge the genius
of the Brown family, for they had succeeded, for a time at least,
in banishing the look of suspicion and fear that had always
sprung into the boy's eyes at his mother's mention of them. It
had an intricate origin, that look, for it was born of an instinct
that told him in quiet hours that their way led far from his, but
it had become merged into the more superficial " pride " which
was the bane of his mother's life. This dispersion could not
have been entirely effected by artifice or even genuine lack of
pride; the secret lay in the fact, hardly manifest to Amelia her-
self yet, that she was interested in him.

"I shouldn't like any onebelongin' to me to follow the sea/'

CASUALS OF THE SEA 255

she told him, after they had discussed his visit to the Cygnet
and he had tried to convey to her the strange charm of looking
up at those vast spars and dizzy topmasts, the unique personality
of a ship, and her mute message from the great Beyond. " An*
the figger-'ead, it's an angel, 'oldin' one 'and to 'er breast and
pointin' upwards like with the other. An' all gilt. Hiram Gay-
nor says she dips right in sometimes when it's a storm." He
had tried, but without much success. Ships and the sea had to
come across the theatre footlights to make any impression on
Amelia. Her mind was like the old-fashioned cameras; the
image appeared on the ground-glass screen upside down, and it
needed the condensing lens of dramatic art to make any per-
manent impression at all. He had grasped his coat and pointed
" upwards-like " with the other to show her what he meant,
and she had smiled and drawn down the corners of her mouth
in a way he came to know well, and looked round to see if any
one had noticed his theatrical pose. Had he been on the stage
she would have thrilled at the gesture and called it splendid.
In the Kennington Road it was " silly."

" Don't ! " she hnd muttered, and a flash of the old suspicion
had darted across his face, only to vanish when she smiled.
" Why," he said, following her glance round. * Where's Ethel
an' John?"

" Somewhere along," she answered, as though the matter were
of trivial interest. " We'll see them at the theatre ; John's got
the tickets."

When they reached the theatre and were working into the
crowd that moved about in front of the main entrance, Hannibal
found himself pressed up against his cousin, and it was the
most natural thing for him to put his arm across her back and
steer her along in front of him. She looked up at him once or
twice, her lower lip between her teeth, and they exchanged
glances and trivial remarks.

" It's always a crush on Saturday nights."
"Yes, s'pose so. Don't worry; I'll look after you."
" We'll have to wait here for John. This is the upper circle
staircase."

"Right; where is 'e?"

" There he is."

John appeared forging through the crowd, alone.

"Where's Ethel?"

256 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" We met Arthur, so I gave 'em the tickets an* came on," said
the young mechanic. " They're gassin' about some'ink. Here
y'are."

" John, you know father's pretty easy, but he draws the line
at Arthur," said Amelia as they went up. " And I must say I
agree with him too. If he had any idea "

" Oh, rats, my, it's all off in five minutes."

" I know that. I'm not afraid of her doing anything so silly
as that. What I mean is, I know and you know that Arthur's
nothing more nor less than a bookie. That's what I'm so afraid
o' father hearin'."

" Only now and again."

" No, it isn't now and again. I see him myself in the Ken-
nington Road loitering round the gates, day after day. I
wouldn't give much for his neck if father catches him with Ethel.
You know how down he is on that sort of thing."

John did know, and winced. Hannibal listened to this little
passage of arms with a deep interest. It is significant of the
amorphous morality of our times that he should have grown up
tolerant of betting and distrustful of theatres while the Brown
family took theatres as a babe takes milk and held betting to
be one of the seven deadly sins. For this latter sentiment is
a natural outcome of their theory of life. They hold their posi-
tions by virtue of their capacity for industry and commerce, and
by some instinct implanted in them in bygone ages they know
the gambler and all his works to be their foe. There is n«
religious feeling in the matter, it is a plain strong morality
fashioned to suit their temperament and condition. Ethel and
John were young and had not yet arrived at full conviction.
They played with fire, but played knowing as well as Amelia
or Mr. Brown that it was fire; they never tried to palliate the
offence.

To Hannibal the question took a different form. His street
life, in conjunction with his employment in the Repositories,
following a childhood in which early editions and talk of horses
and their form passed without criticism, had familiarised him
with the idea of betting, and the bookie was a mere detail of
daily experience. Beyond the mild dissipation of a Derby-sweep
his conscience was clear, for his interest in sport was small.
But Amelia's strong sentiments on the subject, her obvious
opinion that such practices were bad and not respectable, led

CASUALS OF THE SEA 257

him to fear that he himself might have some difficulty in appear-
ing stainless before her. The prevailing sentiment in Assembly
Passage, and even in Stepney Green, was that a bookie, unless
he were a welsher, was a hard-working citizen with rights like
everybody else. If he made a bit now and then, as no doubt
he did, what of it? This view seemed to have no stability at
all in the presence of Amelia's low-spoken denunciation of the
wicked young Arthur. And with a sudden pang of wholesome
shame Hannibal recalled the affair in Assembly Passage when
he had evaded the blacksmith's attempts at capture. He
coloured deeply as they passed into the theatre, and Amelia,
catching sight of his face in a mirror, mistook the cause of it and
fell to pondering upon the future.

A

4 ' j^ BIT of all right/' agreed Hannibal, stepping back
to the kerb of Billiter Lane and surveying the
ensemble.

You would scarcely have known him in his grey
spring suit, his oiled hair, his coloured shirt with the cuffs turned
back, his preoccupied business-like air. Something of the past
lingered in the creased tie, the ill-fitting collar, and particularly
in the boots. Boots are extraordinary things. When a man
has raised himself in the world his boots are always the last to
follow him up. He is never sure he will not slip back until his
boots assume a permanent improvement. For one thing they
are so expensive. Perhaps the use of trees has a good deal to
do with it, and no one who has not gone through it can realise
the tremendous difficulties of acquiring the tree-habit. With
women, success — in boots — sometimes lingers until the daugh-
ters are grown up, and dancing is an obligation. Small wonder
then that Hannibal's best, nine months old and eight-and-eleven
in the Cambridge Heath Road, should contrast poorly with the
spring trousers and the oiled hair.

He stood on the kerb oblivious of his boots, however, admir-
ing the ensemble of Amelia's venture, which was to open next
morning. Mr. Brown's incursion into shop-fitting had been
recent but thorough, and he had taken a genuine pleasure in
putting good work into his daughter's premises. The premises
themselves, if plurals are not to be denied to a floor area of
eleven feet by nine, had been provided with a sufficiency of
shelves and electric lights (Gilfillan Filaments being specified by
Amelia), a patent till and a rubber mat. Outside over the shop,
Mr. Brown's sign specialist had had the pleasure of seeing a
fancy of his own affixed: ground glass with red letters which
were illumined at night.

Amelia, who was a hotbed of ideas, finally decided on a fancy
name, " The Little Brown Box." Everything was mahogany
in the shop, it was no larger than an ordinary shipping case,
and her name was Brown. Again, it was customary, Amelia

258

CASUALS OF THE SEA 259

knew, for tobacco wholesalers to provide stock and fittings,
charging the returns until the balance was paid off. This she
described rather tersely as robbery, explaining to the scared
Hannibal (in whose heart Assembly Passage still rankled) that
by that method you could easily pay fifty pounds for ten pounds'
worth of stuff. So the capable young woman, who had not
been in a shop in the Strand and another in Holbron for nothing,
ordered her stock for cash, and thereby was enabled to provide
her customers with what they wanted and not with what some
wholesale firm wanted to get rid of.

And now it was all ready, window dressed, lights in order,
scales polished, everything; and he stood on the kerb approving.
Amelia came out and looked up at the sign. Then she looked
at Hannibal, biting her lip roguishly. It was growing dusk,
and she tripped inside again and pressed the switch that illum-
ined the sign. Vanity! She joined Hannibal on the kerb, and
together they stared entranced at the words, the red glowing
sans-serif letters of the sign:

THE LITTLE BROWN BOX

"Think it'll take?" she said.

" Rather ! " he breathed.

" Worst of it is, it uses so much current," she mused, and
then, Vanity having had her turn, Amelia ran inside and
switched it off.

"If we were on a street, now, I'd leave it on to-night as an
advertisement, but nobody ever comes down here at night ex-
cept " She pulled herself up and entered the shop again.

Hannibal thought it very delicate of her not to say " cleaners."

Mrs. Gooderich would have stood any insults now, however,
for Hannibal seemed to have turned the corner and to be on
the upward path of commerce, industry, and respectability.
She gathered, moreover, from her son's remarks that he and
Amelia were on no mere commercial footing, that he admired his
cousin for her business acumen, her strong sense and activity.

" She is a manager," he told his mother.

"Oh, Hanny, suppose you got to like each other?" she had
said, and he had replied,

* So we do, old lady, but look at us. She's older'n me and
she's the boss."

260 CASUALS OF THE SEA

"That wouldn't make any difference/' she said, trembling.

Hannibal thought it would. He stood in a curious position
toward Amelia, a position which her cleverness had managed
to disguise. She had soon found that any hint of patronage
on her part roused the latent fear in his eyes, and she had
adopted a blend of sisterly authority and business brusqueness
that enabled him to find his way among his own feelings and
sort them out, so to speak, while the coarser adjustments of
human intercourse were being made. This was cleverness, for
Hannibal's nature was really very delicately balanced. By
virtue of that gift of his for seeing things in three dimensions
instead of flat outlines and absurd silhouettes, it was necessary
to be most circumspect in dealing with him. If Amelia had not
felt her own weakness towards him, her downright criticism and
tuition would have scared him away. This was not desirable,
since an alien assistant would have been expensive.

Moreover, she liked him.

Hannibal did not discover this all at once. He might not have
discovered it at all if she had not helped him. As, for instance.

They had been busy opening the cases of tobacco and cigars,
Hannibal solemnly assisting with a brand new claw-hammer,
while Amelia ticked off the items on a long advice-note which
had come by post. It was all depressingly methodical and
business-like, and Hannibal, festooned with straw, was reminded
of the Repositories and felt the tentacles of Commercialism clos-
ing around him. He looked through the window; even Billiter
Lane was flooded with spring sunshine. Across the way a
steamship company exhibited a picture of a great liner at anchor
in some tropical port of the Far East, the white hull surrounded
by boats full of naked brown men, the blue sea rimmed by
mountains of a deeper blue and crowned by a violet sky. To
see " strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships ! "
. . . He woke suddenly. Amelia was calling out " What next? "
Soberly he held up a canister.

" Shag seven pounds," she ticked. " That goes into the jars.
We'll sell more of that than anything else. I don't know how
it is. You never see men smokin' shag, but that's the stuff that
goes quickest."

Briskly the work went on, Hannibal stealing a glance now
and then at the picture of the ship and wondering. Hiram
would be out that way now; he had been bound for Singapore.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 261

Singapore! The name haunted him. Was that it in the dis-
tance on that picture, that blur of gilt and white far down the
harbour. Billiter Lane! Singapore!

"That's the lot!" came Amelia's voice into his dreaming.
" Well, Hanny, if we sell all that in a week, we'll be rich, won't
we?"

"We?" he said vaguely. "We? It's yours, ain't it? I'm
only the shopman."

He turned that full swimming brown eye upon her and she
quivered and laughed nervously.

" Don't be silly."

" It's a fact. Ten shillin' a week," he persisted.

" And a commission," she corrected.

" But it ain't ' we/ for all that."

" It may be. It might be better to be partners, p'raps," she
whispered, making little dents on the advice-note with her pencil.

So far had they attained when he had stepped to the kerb
to see the effect of the ensemble. So far that he neglected to
glance again at the picture of the steamer. The Little Brown
Box was now all swept and garnished; all the debris had been
put into the largest case and stored under the counter. They
gave it one last look round before Amelia shut the door, drew
the lattice gate across and double locked it, giving Hannibal
one of the keys.

" You'll want a ring," she said, and then stood, thunder-struck
at her own madness. " For the keys, I mean," she added,
smiling.

" Not for you ? " he countered, shaking the steel gate.

" Oh, go on ! "

It was plain sailing after that. The fact that he had only a
few shillings of his own worried him at first, but the sisterly
manner that Amelia cultivated prevented him feeling hurt when
she paid for their tea. After all, he had been working nearly
a fortnight and so far had had no wages. His reluctance to
" take hold," as Mrs. Gavnor phrased it, to be really business-
like and alert, was in her favour. " You are a manager ! " he
said to her as to his mother. And I think that very defect of
his was one of the reasons that Amelia liked him. His frank
admiration of the speed and skill with which she stocked her
show-cases and glass window-shelves was sweet as civet to her
hardy spirit.

262 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" I'll be down at nine sharp in the morning," she told him as
they stood near Aldgate Pump. " I don't suppose there'll be
any customers for the first few minutes. I've a good mind to
send circulars round, after all father said," she mused. " A
neat little folder, p'raps. Lamport and Gooling had a very
nice one, I remember. It was like a smoker's cabinet and
opened, you see, and inside were the prices and all particulars.
I wonder if I could have something like that ? "

Love is a subordinated passion in the Browns, remember!
Amelia's hand was in her cousin's as she made these reflections,
and it was no use expecting Hannibal to get these ideas. She
would have to do it. And moreover she liked it. She had
imagination and saw her Little Brown Box thriving and throw-
ing off other Brown Boxes until London was studded with them.
Another idea seized her as she stood there saying good-bye, the
idea of using flowers to decorate the Brown Box. Would the
scent of tobacco kill them? Hannibal didn't know. Then she
must ask Ethel. Ethel, who had been at a florist's in Knights-
bridge, would know.

"It's a job to keep up with you/' he laughed. "All these
ideas ! "

" You see," she explained pleasantly, " what you want to be
always on the watch for is something that'll make people come
in again, something to remember you by. I forgot to tell you
never to say ' Don't keep it.' It don't matter what it is, if we
haven't got it, we must get it before they come in again. That's
what a man likes. Perhaps he won't come in for a fortnight;
doesn't matter. I remember a gentleman comin' into Lamport
and Gooling's in the Strand, and asking for Capstan Full
Strength. Nobody ever used to smoke it then. He didn't come
in again for a month, and then he asked for cigarettes. When
I told him I had his Full Strength, he was pleased! And he
came in often after that."

" I see," said Hannibal.

" Now people like flowers and they're very cheap, with all
these girls about the city. So I'll see what Ethel says."

She left nim with a cheery wave of the hand, her underlip in
her teeth, and Hannibal took his way eastward meditating on
his good fortune. It speaks loudly for the unreasonableness of
his character that he should be unconvinced and sombre on this
evening previous to the great event. She had signified unmis-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 263

takably that she was not indifferent to him. Was he grateful?
Surely he should be, when she had taken him up like this, made
him smart and useful and self-respecting. Surely this was
better than Assembly Passage, eh? his conscience almost
screamed at him. Eh, what? Going to sea? Yes, better than
going to sea, too. Hiram? H'm! Hiram didn't tell the whole
story. What about fevers and insects and salt pork? What
about scurvy and frost and blinding snow? Eh? Hiram in-
deed!

So his conscience, pecking here and there from his memory
of maternal and avuncular oratory, answered and overwhelmed
him.

" I see I'm in for it," he remarked to himself. ." And I s'pose
it might be worse."

I do not think his mind carried him as far forward as marriage.
Indeed, his mind never carried him in that direction at all; all
his excursions were made unhampered by time and locality.
The most trivial little thing was sufficient to set him off, as that
shipping poster had carried him to Singapore and the unchang-
ing East. What ineffable happiness! To wander among
strange peoples and palm trees! Palm trees, and white min-
aretted jshrines, surf-torn beaches and blue mountains !

As he strode eastward toward Jubilee Street he thought again
of these things. He figured Hiram on his ship with her great
bellying sails driving through the deep dark blue waters of the
ocean, Hiram lying in his narrow bunk in that tiny cabin by
the mast, " rocked in the cradle of the deep." He figured him
away ashore in one of those wonderful dream-cities, buying
strange shells and boxes, seeing astonishing sights, living every
moment to the full. And then he tried feebly to look forward
along his own track, the humdrum beaten track Amelia was
pointing out to him.

Some one bumped into him and he awoke with a sigh. The
roar of the great London artery was all around him, the noise
and the glare of the shops, the clatter of hoofs, and the ringing
of bells. Hoarse voices cried their wares from barrow and
stand, boys darted to and fro in play, sweethearts loitered arm-
in-arm before the windows, mothers with their children trailed
in and out. The life of the millions seethed and bubbled around
him, leaving him solitary and sad. Once or twice during the
last fortnight it had come to him in a fugitive way that he lacked

264 CASUALS OF THE SEA

character. Why did lie feel so helpless before Amelia's resist-
less energy and capable knowledge of the world? She was only
twenty or so, yet he was as a child in her hands. Why was he
always wandering from the point, dreaming of far-away, seeing
himself in extraordinary and fantastic regions? Was he an
idiot? Was he predestined to fail in this great roaring world
into which fate had pitched him? He wondered.

He was silent at supper that night, his mother failing to elicit
more than monosyllables. Anxiously, after the fashion of
mothers, she supplied his wants, for your dreamy unpractical
youth is as ravenous as any one, in spite of the food of dreams
on which he feeds in secret.

" Everything all right, Hanny ? " she asked him.

" Yes, I s'pose so, old lady," he mumbled.

Later she bent over him as he slept, after the foolish fashion
of her kind, trembling, yet with an unwonted gladness in her
eyes. To launch one frail craft safely, to see him on his way
secure and ballasted with gold. . . . What happiness! After
long grief and pain, after tragic failure and the bitter bread of
indigence and neglect, to sink back and sigh " nunc dimittis."
Could it be?

She knelt down and prayed incoherently to God that it might
be so.

VI

IT was a custom in the Brown family to have occasional re-
unions in their house off the Kennington Road. For Mts.
Brown, of course, it had of late become out of the question,
but the young people kept it up. Tom-tom, of course, was
engaged, and to a very nice girl too, who was in an office, in the
City, and helped him in his book-keeping. John's steady flame
burned before a pale young lady, " very refined," in black, whose
people had had losses. Ethel, not to be outdone at these gather-
ings, would hastily select from among her loves a presentable
specimen (not necessarily engaged, but eligible), and bring him to
her father as " Friend o' mine, dad."
And Amelia brought in Hannibal.

Mr. Brown brought in a battalion of old friends on his own
account, and all these people, shovelled together and wedged
in the neat villa, were very bewildering to Hannibal. But the
Browns enjoyed it. They had, to its fullest range, that glorious
gift of enjoying vulgar pleasures. The apple of their content
was not cankered by the worm of culture and fastidiousness.
They ate their high tea, passing each other salt and bread and
great trenchers of provender; they stood up and made silly,
laughable speeches while they cut a pie and pulled a cork;
they joked in a quite impossible way about affairs of the heart;
they sang comic songs that were not comic, and love-songs
that reached to the depths of banality. They had a gramo-
phone and used it, sometimes during the meal. They had mando-
lins, and Tom-tom went regularly every Monday and Thursday
to learn the banjo. Ethel, that youthful Messalina of Ken-
nington, played after a fashion on the piano, by which I mean
she vamped, and having a good ear and a non-critical audience,
she did better than many. Later on in their career they took up
piano-players and the gramophone was put in the breakfast-room.
For the Browns are the real supporters of progress in the Arts.
They are always the first to take up the new idea. Who had
incandescent mantles first? Neither you nor I; but the Browns
had them while we walked in darkness. Who first discarded the

265

266 CASUALS OF THE SEA

old musical-box and bought the gramophone? Who seized the
safety bicycle and made it their own? Who listens to the voice
of the inventor crying in the wilderness? Not the cultured and
leisured ones of the land, not the literary and scientific, but the
Browns, the Cerebos of the earth. They are the people who read
the advertisements.

The subject of the hour when Hannibal first attended one of
these functions was dancing. John was taking lessons and was
very serious about it, by which I mean he was " taking hold "
and studying the subject. Ethel seemed always able to hop
about, and quite surprised them all by stating her intention of
" taking it up/'

" Why, I thought you knew all about it," said her father, carv-
ing cold beef. Ethel smiled in a superior way.

" Oh, I've only picked it up, dad. Lessons are different."

She took it up, dropped it, took it up again, and then, in
consequence of a disappointment (the young man going to
Honolulu without warning), abandoned dancing for professional
rinking, which rolled her, almost before she was aware of it, into
the arms of a husband.

Hannibal sat amid the clatter of knives and forks and the
babel of the reunion ill at ease. Here was another of his de-
fects being painfully shown up. When Amelia asked him if he
could dance, he shook his head mournfully.

" Then you must learn," she informed him. What a girl she
was for ideas! He hadn't thought of that. The same with
cards. After tea he sat beside her, cards in hand, trying to
keep his attention on the game. If you can't do a thing, take
hold and learn. How efficient they all were ! Even Mr. Brown
was winning a whole heap of wax vestas at whist. Later they
began singing. Tom-tom led off with " Sing me to sleep," ac-
companied by John's sweetheart, all joining in the chorus.
By this time Mr. Brown and his senior friends were sitting over
cigars and whisky in the dining-room, leaving the youngsters to
themselves and their love-making in the drawing-room. For the
Browns had no pride and no false shame in making love under
three incandescent mantles. They kissed each other, and sat
on each other's knees in a most refreshingly frank fashion, and
when John trod on Amelia's skirt and brought it down, there was
a roar of merriment and every one helped to fix it up again.
And then when Ethel was forced on to the piano stool and they

CASUALS OF THE SEA 267

began whirling round to the measure of a waltz, Hannibal found
himself seized.

"Come on, I'll show you," said a laughing voice in his ear;
and before he was aware of it he was holding Amelia's waist and
watching John's agile feet in an endeavour to glide. He was
terribly self-conscious and awkward, but to the Browns self-
consciousness while learning to do anything was a forgotten
myth. All they demanded of you was that you should try, and
be good-tempered. " Keep on your toes," commanded Amelia,
doing her best to avoid shipwreck against the corner of the piano.
If she had added, " And keep off mine," the advice would not
have been out of place.

At length the " dreamy " waltz tune was shut off in the
middle of the bar in the irritating way amateur musicians have,
and the sliding molecules of humanity stopped and broke away
with laughter and gasps for breath.

" Do you like it? " asked Amelia, readjusting a hairpin. Her
cheeks were flushed, and when she showed her even teeth she
looked almost pretty. Hannibal felt to see if his tie was up at
the back, and then laughed.

" Don't know if I'll ever be much good at it," he replied.
" I never went in for that sort o' thing much."
"But you will?"
"Why — I s'poseso."

A shadow crossed Amelia's face as she looked at him. She
liked him; he seemed all right in the Little Brown Box, and he
looked a very desirable young man as he stood there, his face
flushed and his attractive brown eyes smiling at her. But she
did not like this streak of ineffectiveness, this lack of " go."
To her it was silly for a man to be reluctant when you showed
him the way. She looked over to where John was explaining
to Ethel and Tom-tom the intricacies of his last lesson. Wild
horses, Red Indians, all Hell would not stop John in his pursuit
of the art of dancing now he had taken it up. But Hannibal
did not seem interested.

It was quite true that he was doing pretty well at the Little
Brown Box. Each morning he opened the collapsible gate and
pulled up the brown blinds, each evening he lowered those same
blinds and locked the gate. He was slowly acquiring familiarity
with the stock, and had even made one or two ventures in the
direction of " patter," that light conversation which many cus-

268 CASUALS OF THE SEA

tomers ignore when it is offered, yet miss when it is denied them.
To Amelia it came as naturally as breathing. Comments on the
weather came pattering from her lips as pearls fell from the lips
of the lady in the fairy story. As for Hannibal, if his remarks
had been frogs they could not have been more difficult to bring
up. People seemed to answer Amelia, giving her an opening, so
to speak. She would say, " Looks as if it was clearing, doesn't
it ? " and the customer would laugh grimly and say he hoped so,
but was not going to put his money on London weather. If it
were gloriously fine, she would suggest it was a good day to
change a sovereign, and the customer would cackle with amuse-
ment and ask her what she did with herself during the long
evenings. But if Hannibal, after severe thought, alluded to the
fineness of the day, the customer would either ignore him alto-
gether or point out with biting politeness a shortage in the change
which Hannibal was tendering.
He began to hate the weather.

Eventually, however, Amelia contented herself with a daily
visit to let him go and get his dinner. They got on very well
when they were by themselves. It was in the company of the
Browns and their kindred that she found something lacking in
his spirit. When they were alone, I think she rather preferred
his quietness and the little affectionate way he had of touching
her cheek with his finger, of settling her collarette under her
jacket, and other habits that he practised but did not speak of.
It is possible, though it seems madness to suggest it, that the
Browns' scheme of existence had left one of the human instincts
unprovided for, that the jolly, efficient, sociable Brown religion
was at times a little trying even to its communicants, and that
Amelia was unconsciously drawn to her cousin by reason of his
deficiencies. Those flowers in the Little Brown Box led me to
think there might be something in this view, those flowers and the
canaries who sang high up among the cigar stock. Perhaps
there was a streak of poetry in Amelia, a thin vein of gold in
the quartz of her nature. The worst of the Browns is, that when
they become aware of the vein of gold they turn it into money.
The Little Brown Box was getting a name for its flowers and
canaries. They brought custom and business was good.

To Mrs. Gooderrch there came one benefit of all this: she
escaped from Amelia's bullying. It sounds harsh when written
down, but no other word is to be found to express so justly the

CASUALS OF THE SEA 269

attitude of well-fed young women towards a dispirited widow
who is cursed with pride. Attaining to a certain vague sym-
pathy with Hannibal's nature she found her feelings altered
towards his mother. She paid visits, unknown to him, to Jubilee
Street. She met Mrs. Gaynor there once, and experienced that
lady's soothing influence. It was at this time that she was made
aware of her Cousin Minnie's presence in London. The details
were meagre enough; she was in partnership with a French-
woman in Ebury Street, in a dressmaking business. Enquiry
from Ethel elicited the fact that Ebury Street was " all right,
down Chelsea way, penny 'bus from the top of Sloane Street."
But Amelia was in no mood now to make up any scandal about
her relatives. There was nothing to be got from Mrs. Gaynor
anyway. She had the strangest way of hoping and believing
Minnie was behaving respectably, and if she was, Mrs. Gaynor
said, what were you going to do about it? Being a Brown, this
was a little bewildering to Amelia, but she rested content with the
facts.

And Hannibal behind the counter — what of him? We have
seen him at the reunion, a rather unadaptable youth bewildered
with novel ideas of amusement, abashed equally before the giddy
Ethel and John's refined young lady. He was not " at his best "
at the reunion. But behind the counter, beneath the canaries and
within sight of that picture of the steamer across the way, how
did he fare, this inarticulate lad with his long thoughts?

The fact is, he had formed another habit of which Amelia
was not aware. Even chartermg-clerks and water-clerks, to
say nothing of shipowners hurrying to and from the Baltic,
are not in continual need of tobacco and cigars, and Hannibal
had periods of inaction when the shop was deserted. He could
not smoke continually (Amelia discouraged smoking behind the
counter, anyway), and he fell into the newspaper habit. It
gave him subjects for conversation, if a customer were not in a
hurry. But the newspaper, admittedly a great and glorious
institution, has its limitations. The Literary Year Book tells
me it is primarily for the dissemination of news, and I am willing
to believe it, though I find a good many advertisements. Hanni-
bal's paper, for example, which cost him a halfpenny, devoted
the front page to a New Corset. The back page was occupied
by a " heart to heart talk " by the write-up expert attached to
Gilfillan Filaments Limited. It was called " Darkest London

270 CASUALS OF THE SEA

and the Way Out," and the new form of filament now offered was
modestly described as The Light of the World. Opening the
journal, you found inside still more appeals to your better nature
by the retailers of Cocoa and Whisky firms. You found elixirs
which reduced your fat, secrets which increased your fat, " home
treatments " which, if you were a lady, would develop your bust
until you resembled a pouter pigeon. Illustrations were pro-
vided to show you the gradual inflation. It may add to your
opinion of Mrs. Gooderich to know that Hannibal did not care
to look at those illustrations; they seemed to him unpleasant. If
you were a man and suffered excruciating agony in your spine, as
per illustration of a pain-racked Laocoon, you were informed
that you had only yourself to blame, since Elixerine was just
two-and-ninepence a bottle and every chemist kept it. Furnish-
ing firms pleaded with you to avoid wrecking your happiness and
Her's by senseless delay. Home ! Was it not the sweetest word
in our noble English tongue? Had you no duty to the Mother-
land, to Love, to your unborn children? Were they to come into
the world and find you — married, no doubt — but without that
exquisite drawing-room suite at six shillings down and the bal-
ance at threepence a week? Hannibal became quite disturbed
when he read some of these, but they were pastiche compared
with the shrieks arising from the columns where the unguents
" distilled from rare herbs indigenous to the Upper Himalayas "
were described. " I was a mass of scabs," reported a lady in
high society; and did not seem a bit ashamed of it either, for
there was her portrait, with jewels and scabs complete. Hanni-
bal's notions of high society were confused enough, but he thought
-" it was a case for a 'orspital " when one's face got as bad as
that.

Eventually his wandering mind was caught by an item of
news hidden away in the middle of the paper, far from the
madding crowd's ignoble strife, a brief report of a fire in China,
where a couple of hundred thousand had been driven from
their homes by the flames. His imagination was caught by the
news; he tried to figure to himself all those terrified yellow
men and women battling with the fire, the roar as the wind blew
it onward, the cries of the dying, the desolation of the smoking
ruins. He wished there was more about it, but somehow the
newspaper had no room for any more. There was a most elo-
quent article just below — over half a column — giving the circu-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 271

lation figures of the paper for the previous month. There he
saw another paragraph stating that a sailing ship had been lost
with all hands off Cape Horn, and Hannibal's thoughts went
back to Hiram on the Cygnet. He would close his paper and
put it away under the counter with a sigh. The agony of those
yellow men, that last fight with all-encompassing death in the
storm, these things seemed trivial indeed to the newspaper. Evi-
dently people did not want to be told what was happening in
the great world. They wanted to be told what to buy.

He had an idea one day, though this has nothing to do with
the habit. Amelia came in with her usual briskness, and after
smiling a greeting she stood looking round critically at the
counter-dressing, considering improvements.

" Goddness me ! What's that ? " she exclaimed, as a faint
squeal reached her ears. Hannibal grinned and beckoned her to
come round. She came round quickly and stopped short at the
sight. A small grey kitten was trying valiantly to climb up his
leg, a tiny atom of a thing, with a pointed tail and scared eyes.

Amelia did not like cats, and she was about to say so sharply
when something in his attitude as he stooped and took the little
thing in his arms made her pause. His face was apologetic,
yet

" Thought it 'Id be company," he muttered. " They was
goin' to drown it, so I fetched it up."

" Nasty little things," she muttered. " I can't bear 'em."

The kitten clambered up on his shoulder, and erecting the
pointed tail seemed well pleased.

" Mind you don't leave the canaries down on the floor then
when you clean the cage," she warned him.

" That's all right, Amy. You don't mind me 'avin' it? "

"If you really want it, only we don't want a menagerie in
the shop, do we ? "

" No. Only time 'angs a bit in the mornin's, you see."

" You ought to follow the news. Keep up with the times."

" So I do, but there's nothin' in the paper 'cept advertise-
ments."

" Well, why not get a book out of the libr'y ? It passes the
time."

"That's a good idea!" he remarked, stroking the kitten.
" There's an ol' book-shop in Aldgit I pass every mornin'.
There's all sorts in the tuppeny box. I'll 'ave a look at 'em."

272 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" You don't want to buy books ! " she nearly screamed. There
are some things the Browns of this world cannot and will not
stand, and spending money on books is one of them. Buying a
book is with them a sign of a mind unhinged.

" Now an' again," he suggested, cowed. " They're only tup-
pence."

And that was how he contracted the habit which led to ac-
quaintance with Mr. Brober.

VII

IT was he who spoke first as Hannibal shyly took up book
after book in the twopenny box and scanned the pages for
something that might interest him. The twopenny box did
not seem to contain much of that sort. In fact, whatever
the authors of those books had aimed to accomplish, it was not to
thrill the reader.

" Student ? " enquired Mr. Brober, a black briar in his mouth.
He was an elderly unclean man, in an old frock coat and a golf
cap of uncertain shape, and his shoulders were bent as he ac-
costed Hannibal.

The young man put the book down nervously and laughed.

"Me? No, Mister."

He might have been, thought Mr. Grober, looking him over.
He often had poor students at his shop, dressed in shabby suits
and amorphous boots. For Hannibal's new spring suit, fol-
lowing the eternal law of spring suits selling ready-made at
twenty-seven shillings (vide advertisement twice a week in Han-
nibal's halfpenny paper), was now, after six months' wear, de-
crepit, without form and void of symmetry.

" I was going to say," continued Mr. Grober, " that if you
were, I have a stock of text-books inside at extremely low prices.
Come in."

" I was only lookin' fer something to read," explained Hanni-
bal apologetically, as though such a motive were unheard of
by a bookseller. And he followed the old man into the gloom
of his shop.

" Here they are," said Mr. Grober, indicating several shelves
of thin books with gilt letters on the backs, Classics, Mathematics,
and Science.

Hannibal shook his head.

" No use to me," he assured the old gentleman. " I've got
no 'ead for that stuff."

" Then what ? " asked Mr. Grober, sitting down in his chair
again. " What is the sort of work vou require? "

"Work?" echoed Hannibal blankly.

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274 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" I mean book/' Mr. Grober corrected. " What sort of book
do you require ? "

Hannibal gazed round helplessly at the dusty shelves. " Some-
thing to read," he replied.

" Novels ? "

" No, not novels/' Hannibal's notion of novels was confined
to the formidably long romances his mother had been accus-
tomed to read. " Not novels."

"What then? Books of travel or "

"Ah! Something about the sea. I s'pose you 'aven't any-
thing like that — cheap ? " He waved his hands.

This was the beginning of Hannibal's induction to literature.
For nearly an hour he sat in the dusty shop while Mr. Grober
descanted upon the decline of taste in good literature. Many
of his remarks fell upon empty air. It was evident that Mr.
Grober only required an audience, he took replies for granted.
Eventually, however, he came round to the subject of immedi-
ate interest to Hannibal. He directed attention to a box of
paper-covered books and explained his system. When you had
read it, you brought it back to Mr. Grober in good condition,
and he gave you twopence for it. By this scheme you paid a
penny only for a volume published at sixpence or a shilling.
To Hannibal the scheme seemed admirably adapted to his needs,
and begged Mr. Grober to select something for him. Re-
lighting his black briar, Mr. Grober complied, laying out volume
after volume. Many of them seemed to the lad to belong to
that class of literature known to illiterate folk as " blue." There
was Manon Lescaut, Mon Uncle Barbassou, Moll Flanders, Ma-
dame Bovary, and those beautiful short stories with which Emile
Zola lightened the sombre burden of his days. Then Hannibal's
eye lighted upon An Iceland Fisherman, and he took it up.

" It's about the sea," he said, and Mr. Grober nodded.

" One of the most exquisite idylls of the sea," he remarked.
" I doubt if you will quite appreciate to the full the genius of
Loti."

" I think I'll take this for a start," said Hannibal, producing
threepence. " I was thinkin' o' goin' to sea once," he con-
fided.

Mr. Grober was not interested in this. He was one of those
men who can be reached by no other channel save that of litera-
ture. He would have passed every fisherman from Dundee to

CASUALS OF THE SEA 275

Southwold without noticing they were fishermen, but An Iceland
Fisherman was literature, ergo he knew all about it.

How shall we describe the boy's delight in the new world
that now opened out before him? Ravenously he followed the
fortunes of those French sailors in the stormy north seas, in
the treacherous Channel and out in the burning East. Sometimes
he would draw a long breath and look out long and earnestly at
that steamer in the blue harbour, while the grey kitten climbed
over him, purring in his ear, and the canaries sang above him.
And then, when the door opened and a customer came in, he
would return to reality with a jump and pursue his business of
selling tobacco.

" It's all right, that," he told Mr. Grober when he brought
it back. There was a slight crack in the cover which he feared
had not improved the volume, but Mr. Grober did not notice it
and motioned to him to pick out another.

It was late, for he had been for a walk with Amelia, and
near closing time, and Mr. Grober seemed taciturn and uneasy.
As Hannibal turned round he saw the door at the back partly
open and a sharp-featured woman peering out. The door closed
abruptly as he turned. Mr. Grober followed him outside to
bring in the boxes preparatory to shutting up. Hannibal, sens-
ing Mr. Grober's desire to explain something, flung his thumb
over his shoulder.

" Old lady ? " he asked in a low tone. Mr. Grober bowed his
head over the threepenny box.

" The same," he said.

" I see," said Hannibal, though he saw nothing.

" The fact is," said Mr. Grober, straightening himself with
the box on his hands. " The fact is, my young friend, that
though many of our master minds have described Hell, and many
of our great painters have endeavoured to represent it on canvas,
not one of them has succeeded in portraying anything so ghastly
as a square peg in a round hole !

And Mr. Grober marched slowly into the shop and deposited
the box on a chair. Hannibal stood waiting for further revela-
tions, hoping they might be clearer than this one. When the old
man emerged and bore down upon the twopenny box, he said:

" 'Ow d' you mean, Mister? "

" I mean," said Mr. Grober, " I mean that the torments of a
Lost Soul are radiant bliss compared with the life of an Idealist

276 CASUALS OF THE SEA

in a world of Stark Reality ! " And in he went, his old golf
cap askew on his grey head, his untidy head on his breast, a for-
lorn and weary figure.

" What's up, Mister? " enquired the youth when he reappeared
to pull down the shutters. Mr. Grober grasped the pole and
held it out at arm's length, looking sternly up the street. The
few people who were passing took no notice of them.

" Under your arm," remarked Mr. Grober, " you have the
story of a man who never married. Eventually he drowned him-
self. He chose the better part."

And pulling down his shutter with a jar and a bang, Mr.
Grober re-entered his premises.

Hannibal, Toilers of the Sea safe in his pocket, went home in
deep thought. To a certain extent he understood Mr. Grober's
cryptic utterances to refer to domestic affairs. Things, he con-
cluded, had gone wrong between 'em. Old chap was fed up,
perhaps. She didn't look over good-tempered. He told his
mother about it over his supper.

" P'raps, he drinks," said Mrs. Gooderich. " What 'ave you
got this time ? " She looked through Victor Hugo's pages.
" What is it, a novel? " she asked.

" I reckon it's a story from the look of it," he returned,
" but not like that one you're readin'." And he pointed with
his knife to where Mrs. Southworth's works lay among the
things on a side-table. Mrs. Gooderich would not argue this
point with a young man. One of the remnants which made up
her ethical bundle was a disbelief in too much reading for chil-
dren. Certainly her children had never indulged themselves in
this vice. She regarded the book with suspicion. About a man
who never married, eh? And Mr. Grober said he chose the bet-
ter part. What a difference between such books and Ishmael,
which was about a man who had two wives at once ! Of course,
it was all a terrible mistake, and didn't he pay bitterly for it?
But that was so true. We do pay for our mistakes, Mrs. Goode-
rich thought.

" He's a funny old chap," Hannibal went on. " He talks like
a book."

" I only 'ope," said Mrs. Gooderich, " that 'e won't go puttin'
ideas into your 'ead, that's all."

It would be a grave offence, she thought, to put ideas into
people's heads.

VIII

WHEN Amelia came briskly along Billiter Lane one
evening in May, she crossed over to the other side
to obtain a good view of the Little Brown Box.
Everything was in apple-pie order in the win-
dow, she noted, the sign had been cleaned, the door-handles were
bright, and her face expressed calm approval. What a pity
Hanny was such a stick to go out with ! He didn't seem to have
any idea what to say to a girl. That reading habit of his seemed
to be spoiling him. She stood a few moments watching, but
there was no sign of him coming out to meet her. H'm! Read-
ing, very likely, or playing with the kitten. She stepped across,
opened the door, and found the place empty.

For a moment she looked round helplessly, her brain stunned
by the enormity of the thing. A canary trilled and twittered at
her, but she took no notice. The kitten, asleep on the counter,
stretched and curled up again. Amelia drew a quick breath,
stepped behind the counter and took off her things. She hardly
knew what to think. Had there been an accident? Had
he . . . ? She darted to the till, unlocked it and counted fev-
erishly. No, it seemed about as usual. What then? Suddenly
a figure passed the window, the door opened and Hannibal came
in. Her face hardened.

" This the way you look after your work? " she asked.

" Just went out for some change, Amy," he replied, his
eyes faltering as he glanced from the open till to her face.
He came round and put some silver into the drawer. She looked
at him coldly.

" Wrhy didn't you lock the door?" she asked. "The whole
place might have been cleared out. How long have you been
away?

" Only a minute."

" I've been here five," she said, and a curious look came
over her face. " We'd better have it out now or we'll get into
a bad way," she went on.

277

278 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" I can seen who comes in from — from the other place,"
he said sullenly.

"What other place?"

" The pub down — on the other side/' he said.

" Oh, you get change at the pub, do you ? What's the mat-
ter with the bank? I thought we'd arranged all that. You've
got all the change you need there, as far as I can see."

" Oh, all right, all right," he muttered.

" It isn't all right, all right," she retorted. " This shop's
mine, and I can't afford to have it left alone, that's all."

" Anybody 'd think I was out all the time," he complained.

" As you will be if nobody says anything." She turned away
with a gesture of vexation. " I was comin' up to ask you to
come over to supper this evenin', and — and this spoils it all."
She finished with a break in her voice. Hannibal was silent,
shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot.

" It won't 'appen agen," he said at length.

"How do I know?" she flung at him passionately. "I
thought we were goin' to get on so well, too."

He turned and put out his hand as though to toucli her,
but she moved away and his hand dropped irresolutely. A
customer came in and broke the spell, and Hannibal busied
himself with the stock while Amelia served. When the man
had gone out, she began again.

" Promise me," she said, steadily. " Promise me you won't go
into a pub again."

" All right," he answered in a low voice.

" Can't you see," she queried, " how important it is not to
leave the shop for a minute? It's all for your own good, isn't
it? If people come in . . . why the business'll drop right down
if people come in and find nobody here ! " She looked at him
wide-eyed. All the tradition of the Brown family was outraged
by this terrible and unheard-of defection. Hannibal twisted
uneasily under her gaze.

" Yes, I know," he muttered.

" I only hope," she said, " you're tellin' me the truth, and
you didn't go to the pub for anything else. I don't like those
places. They never did anybody any good yet."

He was silent.

" You haven't promised me, Hanny," she added gently.

" All right," he said. " You know best, I s'pose."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 279

" I do, that's a fact. Now, are you comin' down to Kenning-
ton?"

" Yes, I'll come. I was goin' down to get a book though."

"Well, it isn't far, is it? I'll come down with you."

At seven o'clock they shut up the Little Brown Box and
walked down Fenchurch Street towards Aldgate, joining the
dense throng of homeward-bound toilers who were tempted
by the summer feeling in the air to avoid the 'buses and wear
out their shoe-leather instead. It is marvellous how difficult
it is in London to get any pleasure without paying for it.
Amelia looked at the girls who passed with interest. She knew
them all well, knew what they worked at, how much they earned
and how they lived. She was not above them just because
she had a shop. No thought of superiority ever entered her
head. If she had had "property," of course it would be dif-
ferent.

" These Sheenies ! " she said laughingly to Hannibal as a tall,
stylishly-dressed Jewess passed them in her panoply of velvet
and lace. " What a rig to work in ! "

Hannibal started guiltily. He had been far away from Aid-
gate just then.

" Ah," he said.

" I shall have to keep an eye on you," said his cousin archly,
" or perhaps you'll be keepin' company down here."

" Not me," he asserted with vivid sincerity. " One's enough
for me."

" D'you mean it?" she asked, not quite certain of his drift.

He paused in front of Mr. Grober's faded shop.

" This is it," he said. " I shan't be a minute." And he
went in hastily. Amelia regarded the place with some disdain.
A second-hand bookshop was not much in her line. Hannibal
had explained how he got his books for a penny each, and she
had expressed a hope that there was no danger in them. " You
never know where they've been," she remarked.

Mr. Grober was glad to have a visitor. He offered Hannibal
a battered and ill-printed copy of The Flying Dutchman and
begged him to take a seat.

" I can't. I got a little friend waitin' outside," he explained.

Mr. Grober was visibly depressed. He had hoped, he said,
that Hannibal would have a chat and possibly some refresh-
ment.

280 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Not now/' said the young man hastily, looking through
the shelves at Amelia. Mr. Grober looked also.

" Ah," he remarked. " A counter-attraction, I see."

" Some other time," said Hannibal, moving off. " Goo' night,
Mr. Grober."

" Good night, and heaven help you," said the old gentle-
man, watching Amelia from behind the books. He came to
the door, and when she looked in his direction bowed in an
old-fashioned way. But Amelia did not include Mr. Grober
among her charities. He was dirty and untidy, and he looked
incompetent, her critical glance told her. She moved off quickly
with her cousin.

" You aren't taking up with that sort of people, are you ? "
she asked coldly.

" Me? Oh, I have a chat now and then," said Hannibal, try-
ing to be unconcerned.

" Well, I shouldn't if I was you. At least it's this way : We
can't afford to be friends with such people. They always want
something, generally money."

" He don't want anything," remonstrated Hannibal.

" I'm only tellin' you. He looks as if he could do with some,
anyhow. I hate these untidy people. Let's take a 'bus."

When they were on the 'bus, she began again. She took pos-
session of his mind, stowing away axiom after axiom, fact after
fact, until he was bewildered and sullen. She felt that she
must lose no time in formally educating him up to the Brown
standard.

"If people aren't gettin' on, they're slippin' back," she told
him. " They can't stand still. And if they're slippin' back it's
best to keep away — you can't do anything."

"Why not give 'em a 'and same as you did me?" he asked.

She folded her hands on her purse and looked steadily ahead
towards the Surrey side.

" Relations are different," she observed, and thereby handed
him another piece of family philosophy. " That old fellow
lias never done himself any good and he's not likely to do you
any. Keep yourself to yourself, except among those you know."

" 'E's 'ad a very good education," ventured Hannibal.

" So I should say by the dirt behind his ears," said Amelia.
"I've seen his sort in the Strand, or something very like it.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 281

They want tick, these people with wonderful educations and long
hair. Mind you don't encourage him."

"All right, Amy. What's on to-night?"

" I was goin' to tell you, only so many things put it out o*
my head. Mother's comin' home from Bournemouth to-night
and we're goin' to meet her. It's at eight-thirty at Victoria."

" Is she ? " said Hannibal dubiously.

" Well, you don't seem very enthusiastic," complained the
young lady. " Mother's very delicate, but she manages at home
now the weather's warm. I suppose you haven't seen her for
a long while? "

" Not since the funeral," he replied briefly. To Hannibal
and his mother there was but one funeral, and they had used
the phrase to cover a number of things. " Since the funeral "
meant since Minnie had left them, since Maple Avenue had be-
come a memory, since Bert had gone.

" Well," said Amelia, " you'll see her now." To the Browns
their mother's illness was not a thing to joke about. If they
had been poor they would have gone without the necessaries of
life to get her wine and beef extract. They were a brilliant
example of the family who owe nothing to their parent save their
being, yet who worship her and revere her weakness as though
she had sacrificed everything for them.

"What's the matter with Aunt Eliza?" asked Hannibal, in
the same tone as he would ask " What's the matter with the
chimney?" if it smoked.

" Kidneys," said Amelia in an awed voice. Neurasthenia had
not been discovered then, and nervous disorders were located
in the body by an unimaginative faculty. " She had breakdowns
too. Doctor says that she mustn't exert herself at all. It's a
great strain on her, this railway journey. Dad went down this
morning to bring her up."

" I expect she's forgotten all about me," Hannibal surmised.

" I told her, you know, when I wrote about the shop and all
that."

The conversation dwindled, and Hannibal found himself faced
by the problem which had been growing and growing in his
mind for some time. It was a curious problem for a young man
of reflective mood to find before him, like a black cloud which
he could not elude, being none other than this: "What am I

282 CASUALS OF THE SEA

doing? " To such clarity of vision had he arrived by this time,
aided undoubtedly by the books he had been absorbing day by
day. For, unlettered as he was, unskilled in the fine analysis
of motive and feeling, he saw plainly enough that the difference
between himself and these men in the books was simply they
were doing something, while he was dreaming his life away
amid cousins, canaries, and cigarettes. The thought grew and
grew within him, and his eyes became less and less observant
of the material world. It was an intensely interesting question
for a young man, for he was aware in a dim fashion that, if he
liked, he could batter down the walls of the prison, he could
struggle out into the fresh air and join those heroic souls who
do things in the world.

He was unfortunate perhaps in this, that Amelia had none
of the fine, careless admiration for courage which had been so
fashionable among young women a few years ago, when the
war-spirit was upon the nation. It died away, if you remember,
afterwards, a wave of religious and social uplifting swept
across the land, knights in shining armour were seen no more,
khaki-clad bank-clerks went again into the black livery of their
calling, and the army lost its prestige among women. Amelia
was a very accurate reflection of her class. Had she been
touched with that lust for romance which was, we are told,
inseparable from mediaeval womanhood, she might have given
Hannibal the necessary impetus to perform some deed of dar-
ing. This, however, was not to be. Amelia was a child of
her time, a time of peace and musrc-halls, of social reform and
municipal enterprise. To her, as to all the other girls of that
period, courage and high endeavour, romance and beauty, were
not to be found in life but on the stage and cinema-film.
Hannibal felt this, and gave no sign of the difficulty that con-
fronted him. She would have looked at him blankly at first,
and then the corners of her mouth would have come down
in contempt. To her a craving for a fuller life would have
meant simply an excuse to get out of working. Her world
was littered with people who dodged or tried to dodge their
natural destiny — labour. She classed Mr. Grober with these.
For, strange to say, running a tobacconist's was work, but a
second-hand bookshop was " mooching about."

Their entry into the Brown homestead caused a diversion
of their thought from matters purely personal to those of the

CASUALS OF THE SEA 288

family. Ethel it was who, in a white blouse with short sleeves
and a narrow band of velvet round the throat, answered the
door and gave them a wide-welcoming smile.

" Good old Amy, here at last ! " she said. " Come along,
Hanny, we're waiting for you. Father'll have a fit if we're
late.""

They were all round the supper-table; John and l>is young
lady, Tom and his, Ethel with a brand-new and extremely
eligible looking young man in a tail-coat, who was in fact the
laundry-manager who afterwards levanted to Honolulu. It was
obvious that to them this home-coming of an invalid mother was
an event of importance. Hannibal felt that if he could feel no
interest in Mrs. Brown he could not possibly be one of the family.
In some dejection he admitted to himself that his interest was nil.
He regarded Ethel's new young man with envy. With all im-
aginable ease the laundry-manager slid into the stream of con-
versation, picking up the threads of past topics with dexterous
precision, and receiving confidences in a way that showed un-
mistakably the Browns were forgetting how recently he had
joined their ranks. Hannibal demanded of himself with some
bitterness why he could not do that, but without eliciting any
clear reply.

" I see you're one of the thoughtful sort," said Miss Sander-
son, John's refined young lady, who sat next to Hannibal. She
smiled indulgently at the bread her long fingers were crumbling,
and looked at him kindly. He gave a sigh of relief and re-
turned her gaze frankly.

" It's only because I 'aven't anything to say," he told her in
confidence. " Somehow I never do 'ave in company," and he
sighed again.

" Perhaps you think all the more," she insisted, with another
smile.

" I'd'no," he said. " I reckon if a chap thinks, he can spit
it out, don't you? If he thinks real, I mean."

" How do you mean by real? "

" Why, when a chap thinks o' something and then does it.
'E's got something to talk about then."

" Why not do something then? " Miss Sanderson's eyes were
smiling. She was enjoying herself with the young man.

" How can I, selling fags? " he asked simply.

" What do you want to do? " she queried.

284 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" That's just ft," he told her, a far-away look in his eyes.
" That's just it. I'm blowed if I know."

" But aren't you trying to get some idea ? "

" Oh, I got millions of ideas, but what's the use if you 'aven't
got the dough? "

" John's got ideas by the thousand for patents," she laughed.
" But I'm afraid he'll never get the dough, as you call it."

" It's different with 'rm," Hannibal mused in confidence to
her. " He's got 'is dad. I daresay 'e'll put up the tin some day
if John wants it. I feel a bit out of all this," he added, as they
rose from the table, " though I don't know why I should be
tellin' you."

" I'm interested," she said, with a glance at once arch and
sympathetic. " You must tell me about some of those million
of ideas."

"What are you two flirting about?" called Ethel, who was
pinning on her hat in front of a mirror and could therefore
see behind her.

" You be quiet, Eth. Hanny and me are having a little chat
all by ourselves."

" John, you'll have to be careful," said Tom, brushing his
hat. " These young tobacco merchants, they know how to pick
peaches without treadin' on the grass."

The laugh that followed Tom's sally was shared by Miss
Sanderson, but it did not prevent her joining Hannibal on the
pavement when her own black straw was adjusted. She was,
as I have hinted on a previous page, " very refined," and she
was treated by the Browns as the daughters of Royal Dukes
are treated by Society — with respect. She was permitted to
do things another girl could not very well do; for example,
appropriate Amelia's young man. If you feel astonishment at
this in view of her family having had losses, I can only point
out, in commiseration for your ignorance, the fact that, with
the Browns, indigence after competence was a very different
thing from indigence per se. The Browns argued logically
enough that to have had losses it is first necessary to have had
something to lose. In this case Miss Sanderson's people had
had property and had lost it in a perfectly respectable way.
Miss Sanderson, then, was a bright angel fallen from the heaven
towards which the Browns were endeavouring to climb. About
her there still hung a trace of the brightness of that sphere, a

CASUALS OF THE SEA 285

faint perfume of gentility. You saw it in her walk, in the way
she held her handkerchief to her nose, or the distinguished
manner in which she sat back in her chair at table and crumbled
her bread. She was, though you might not know it, an acquisition
to the Browns. She had M style." Even Ethel knew that.
Even Ethel knew her own pert mannerisms would not have de-
ceived the manager of a fifth-rate musical-comedy troupe — they
were pure Kenninglon, with an edging of Knightsbridge and
Brompton. As I say, you might not know all this, but the
Browns knew it, knew it so thoroughly that the paltry em-
broidery of words was unneeded. They felt :t in their bones.
Miss Sanderson was superior. When she elected to walk with
Hannibal they had nothing to say. Ladies like Miss Sanderson
don't need watching like some people.

That Hannibal felt the full weight of his good fortune may
be doubted. He did not at that time feel the full weight of
anything — until the weight had been removed. But he did
feel with great keenness the immense difference between talking
without effort to Miss Sanderson and trying to talk to Amelia
about the things in his mind. Miss Sanderson was interested;
she said so, and she made him feel she was.

94 Of course, when I say millions, you know what I mean,"
he began, as they hurried towards the 'bus.

" You want something better than the tobacconist business ? "
she asked. He looked round to calculate Amelia's distance.

" Well, you see, I 'ardly like to say it to meself, but some'ow
I do get full up with it. Got no business to be, I s'pose. My
old lady ses I ought to be very thankful to 'ave such a com-
fortable job. I dessay she's right, though it don't make me
feel any different about it. An' yet I don't like to say any-
things, see? "

" You mean seeing it's for Amy you don't like ... ? "

" That's it to a T," he replied.

" Ask her," argued Miss Sanderson.

" No," he whispered. " She wouldn't understand."

Miss Sanderson laughed gently.

" What is it you would like? Go for a soldier? Farming in
the Colonies? (My brother's in New Zealand.) What is it?"

" I don't reckon I'd care what it was if I could only see
something. I been read in* a good bit lately, and I feel all out
of it. This shop-work's all right, if you don't want to see

286 CASUALS OF THE SEA

things. But it's Jubilee Street in the morning Billiter Lane
all day, and Jubilee Street at night. It's chronic."

" I suppose you think you'd like a life of adventure."

" You mean Buffalo Bill an' Sherlock 'Olmes ? Not par-
ticularly."

" Or a life on the ocean wave ? "

" Ah ! " Hannibal started a little as Miss Sanderson touched
on this matter of the ocean wave. Out of his reading and
much fugitive thought he had evolved a strange sea-world of
his own, a world of tropic sunshine and white cities, blue water,
and anchored ships.

" With a wife in every port ? " went on Miss Sanderson,
who had a reputation for prettiness in wit. Hannibal looked
at her in alarm. She was dangerous, this long-necked young
lady who had plighted her troth to the mechanical John. For
it was true; he had dreamed of fairer women than he had ever
seen, the quick heat of his adolescent mind had fashioned them
dark and fair, pale and bronzed. But so shadowy were they, so
lightly did they play their amorous part in those dream ports
of his mind that he recoiled from Miss Sanderson's smiling jest.
He coloured and was silent.

" I say, Lil," said John, catching them up. " Did you go

and see " His voice died to a whisper, and Hannibal heard

no more. The others came up and effected a redistribution of
partners. Ethel, voluptuous with her thin revealing blouse and
well-shaped hips, put her arm through Hannibal's and steered
him toward the waiting 'bus. She was humming. It was
characteristic of Ethel to hum. Presently, when they had
mounted, she began:

"I wonder if the girl I'm thinking of — is think-ing — of — me!"

" Oh, dear, what a life ! I say, Lily," she screwed round
and called to Miss Sanderson, " which button do you press to
make this figure talk ? "

" Why, won't he ? "

" Not to me." She examined Hannibal with humorous criti-
cism. " Perhaps he's in love with me and don't like to show it.
Or don't you like fair girls, Hanny? That must be it, Lily.
He admires brunettes,"

"Chuck it!" pleaded Hannibal.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 287

" What's the matter, Ducky ? Doesn't this old 'bus roll about !
It's like bein' on a ship/' and she began to hum.

" On the ro-o-o-o-l-ling deep ! " ending up with an absurdly-
high squeak that made him laugh as the 'bus threw her against
him.

" Mr. Simpkins '11 be gettin' on to me, sittin' 'ere," said Han-
nibal, feeling the warmth of her body. Mr. Simpkins, the
laundry-manager, was deep in conversation with Amelia.

" Is that your way of sayin' you like my room better'n my
company ? " asked Ethel, looking at Hannibal in a way that
made him uncomfortable. Her moist red lips and full blue eyes
were close to his face, her thigh was pressed against his own,
and he could not help seeing her bosom as his eyes dropped.
He put his arm over the edge of the rail to give himself a little
more room.

" I don't mean that," he stammered. " I only thought *e
might feel out in the cold."

" He knows you're one of the family," she returned. M How's
the Little Brown Box? Is Amy behaving herself?"

" Oh, yes," he laughed. " We manage somehow."

"No lovers' tiffs?"

He shook his head.

"How's Auntie?"

" Pretty fair."

She gave it up at last. Her quick ears caught the drift of
John's conversation with Miss Sanderson on the seat behind,
and turning half-round she joined in. Hannibal looked at her
blouse which was, like most young women's blouses, partly open
at the back. He took the edges and slipped the buttons into
place with one of his gentle caressing motions that all uncon-
sciously reached feminine hearts. She turned to him.

" Hanny," she said, " you're a stick, and I'm goin' to make
you talk. You told a fib when you said you and Amy hadn't
tiffed. She told me all about it."

"About what?"

" You know. She feels it, Hanny. When a girl gets engaged
she likes to be cuddled and made a fuss of. You treat her as if
she was in a glass case."

" Fancy 'er tellin' you that ! "

"She didn't! I didn't say she did. How dare you twist
my words ? She only told me how you said, ' Yes, Amy,' and

288 CASUALS OF THE SEA

' No, Amy/ and/' here Ethel laughed, " shook hands when you
said good-bj'e."

"It is funny, when you come to think of it/' he remarked
coldly.

" Well I never ! " Ethel regarded her cousin with some cu-
riosity. " It isn't off, is it? " she whispered, feverish to get the
first news.

" It will be if people can't mind their own business," he
replied. Ethel's hand strayed to his knee. It was a hand too
plump to be pretty, with well-kept nails and looped with silver
bangles. A white openwork mitten reached to her elbow.

" Hanny," she said, "don't show it before mother, will you?
She can't bear any excitement."

" I ain't excited, Eth ; you needn't worry about me. I wish
you wouldn't do that," he added, as she pressed closer to him.

" Why, what am I doing? "

" Squeezin' ? "

" You are a funny boy, Hanny."

" I know I am, everybody laughs as I go down the street.
I'm a walkin' Comic Cuts, I am," he agreed acidly. " It's the
way I'm made, I s'pose! Family weakness."

If Miss Sanderson, with her delicate psychic apparatus, had
alarmed Hannibal, it was he himself who was now causing
some perturbation in Ethel's plump bosom. This was a new
Cousin Hannibal indeed. She felt a little afraid of him, a
little suspicion that there might be something in him neither
in accord with the Brown philosophy nor actually bad, some-
thing different. Evidently he had a temper, quite cutting.
Poor Amy! They had to get off the 'bus as Ethel arrived at
this conclusion, and Hannibal was not surprised to see her push
through to her sister who was descending the steps. Bumping
against Tom, who was holding his young lady in a firm grip,
Hannibal was glad to exchange humorous comments concerning
the facility in what Tom called "' chin-chewing." Tom and his
young lady did not indulge in the gay amorousness of the younger
members of the family. They courted strictly according to
regulation, they kissed each other on the cheek at greeting and
partings, but Miss Bax felt that her position as senior assistant
in the actuarial department of Messrs. Krehbiel Ganz & Co.,
London Wall, precluded any frivolity in her attitude towards
love. She realised that in a little time she would, as Tom's

CASUALS OF THE SEA 289

wife, assume the virtual headship of the Brown community. It
would not do to place herself exactly on the same level as Ethel,
Amelia, or even Miss Sanderson. Miss Sanderson and she had
measured swords alreadjr; it required all the prestige of Krehbiel
Ganz & Co. (capital seventeen million dollars) to balance Miss
Sanderson's position and refinement as the only daughter of a
gentleman who had had losses. They were too conscious of the
good opinion of the Browns to show any hostility, but one could
imagine them later, each in her holy-of-holies, dissecting each
other before sympathetic allies, and lamenting the shortcomings
of human nature. Tom's deference to the opinion of Miss
Bax showed him to have the makings of an admirable husband,
fitted to carry the business forward to heights undreamed of
by Mr. Brown in his dangling days. Indeed, the secret of their
continued prosperity lay in Tom and Miss Bax, who were at
this moment descending the steps of the 'bus. Hannibal looked
down upon them as curiously as though they were beings of a
different species. Joke as Tom might, and he was not a gloomy
young man, he made you feel the responsibility that lay upon
him. His dark, simply-cut clothes, his leather watch-guard, his
plain tie and slightly old-fashioned collar, his square-toed boots
with elastic sides, the bowler hat which covered his head winter
and summer — all these little points were points of difference
wliich set him subtly apart form the men of straw. Joke as he
might, Tom evidently regarded this pilgrimage to Waterloo to
meet his mother as a sort of ritual. Mrs. Brown was the Queen
Bee of the hive. She had done nothing but give them birth,
which was sufficient. You felt as you watched him and Miss
Bax arm-in-arm, he on the outer side, that this was for them a
solemn moment. The authors of their being — for Miss Bax
already considered them her parents — were even now enduring
that almost interminable purgatory, the wait at Vauxhall; they
had yielded up their tickets, were removing the luggage from
the racks, collecting magazines and rugs, looking out upon the
illimitable roofland of South London. Hannibal, following the
Browns up the incline that leads to the platform, was conscious
of their feeling in the matter. Unknowingly he was up against
the very foundation of our national life. It was the lack of this
solidarity, this community of interest, which had caused the
Gooderich family to fall apart like dry sand. It was Hannibal's
privilege now to behold an apotheosis of the Brown religion as

290 CASUALS OF THE SEA

the train came slowly to rest, and Mr. Brown's head covered
by a soft grey felt hat, protruded from the window of a second-
class carriage. Simultaneously the party moved towards the
compartment, pushing past strangers and porters, splitting round
a barrow and reuniting in an intense little group. An incoherent
murmur of welcome rose from them. Hannibal saw Tom, bare-
headed, tugging at the door, handing out luggage and passing
it on to the others. Hannibal found himself holding a port-
manteau. Then Mr. Brown, broad breasted and summery in
thin grey serge, bent his head and descended amid handshakes
and kissing. So far the Queen Bee had not been visible. Mr.
Brown, looking round, spoke to Tom in grave tones and re-entered
the compartment. Shawls emerged one by one, John was de-
tached to call a four-wheeler to the kerb, porters, like vultures
when the traveller staggers, began to hover on the outskirts, and
then Hannibal caught sight of a large woman slowly emerging
from the dimly-lit train. With much assistance she came to rest
on the platform, and after a pause for welcomes and filial kiss-
ing, moved across to the cab. All were in. strict order of prec-
edence. Mr. Brown and Tom guided the lady's slow footsteps,
Amelia and Ethel carried inlimate things like shawls, rugs, and
chatelaine, John of course stood holding the door of the cab,
Mr. Simpkins and Miss Bax came next with pillows and dress-
ing-case. Miss Sanderson, who seemed to have adroitly avoided
becoming a beast of burden, held her own skirt and looked in-
terested, while Hannibal peeped over her shoulder.

It was very impressive. I have seen a foreign monarch ar-
rive at a London railway station with less impressiveness than
did Mrs. Brown. Even the driver of the four-wheeler twisted
round on his box and looked on with respectful interest. There
was a pause as Mr. Brown took his seat beside his wife; the
group on tip-toe stood as if expectant of a miracle. Mrs. Brown
raised her hand and waved it gently. Tom, still bare-headed,
closed the door with reverence. Suddenly Mr. Brown gave a
hasty glance round, looked at Tom with the look of rigid horror
assumed by Englishmen when they have lost personal property,
and breathed the word " portmanteau." The news was spread
like fire in stubble through the group. Where was the port-
manteau? Hannibal was surrounded, relieved of the burden,
patted on the back as though he had done a noble deed, and
the bag was hoisted to the roof. Mr. Brown was heard to re-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 291

mark in reply to Tom's earnest enquiry, that the boxes were
coming on to-morrow in advance. Tiie word " advance " is used
by railways in England much as " express " is used by parcels
companies in America — facetiously. At length the cab moved
off and the Brown group gazed at the back of it until it was
lost to sight. The next thing to do was to get home as quickly
as possible. Much discussion between Tom and his sister pro-
duced a definite policy. It would not do to be late, therefore
Amelia must take a cab. She could not travel without an escort
even in a cab, so Tom was elected to go with her. But Tom
could not desert Miss Bax. What then was to be done? Ethel
turned round and sought Hannibal.

" Let Hanny go with you, Amy," she said. Tom had no
objection. He could travel in a cab whenever he liked, but
the pleasure of abstaining from luxuries, while knowing he could
have them if he wished, far outweighed the childish joy of
spending money. He was quite willing to let the young fellow
go. Almost before he knew it, Hannibal was inside a second
four-wheeler which had drawn up at the kerb. Amelia was
seated next him. Ethel's generosity in this matter is explained
by the fact that Mr. Simpkins, the laundry manager, had already
pledged himself secretly to a hansom. John's plans were not
known. John's plans could not reasonably expect a great deal
of attention since he was only an apprentice as yet. In fact,
had John not been one of them, the Browns would have been
mildly curious to know how he had come to fall in love with
Miss Sanderson. Even after marriage, when John got a gaffer's
job, the exact relations of the pair were not ascertained by the
family. On one occasion, when his lady had signified with tiger-
ish emphasis the importance of recognising her as boss in her
own house, John had surprised the family by endorsing her claim.
But when the squall blew over and the blue sky of connexional
harmony smiled upon them they found themselves as vague as
ever as to John's standing with her his wife. And so, in the
excitement of four-wheelers and hansoms, pervaded as it was
with Tom's growl and Ethel's high-pitched chatter, John and
Miss Sanderson faded away, to appear at supper (taken on the
knee in the drawing-room) mysteriously happy.

" She looks wonderfully improved," said Amy, as the cab
wrenched round the corner into the street. " Bournemouth
always did suit her." She did not seek for any answer to this.

292 CASUALS OF THE SEA

She was wrapt in a dream, an ecstasy of pleasure at seeing her
beloved parent again. You might have imagined that Amelia,
being the elder daughter, would have felt reluctant to take the
second place again in the house. But she knew that her mother
would be an invalid still. It had become a habit almost im-
possible to break for Mrs. Brown to have things done for her.
She would sit among cushions with a rug over her knees and
receive her lady-friends in state, and those lady-friends would
be under Amelia's thumb. They would have to accept tea and
pastry from her table. They would have to admit her to their
confidence or they would not come again. Miss Bax might be
Tom's sweetheart, but until she was Tom's wife, Amelia was
in charge. She sat there in the cab in a fit of glad abstraction
planning out the summer. Hannibal looked at her furtively in
the darkness and saw that he was forgotten. A sudden percep-
tion came to him, that in all probability he would be forgotten
in the future. He could not for the life of him enter into that
unity of thought which distinguished the Browns and their satel-
lites, and it followed that sooner or later he would be forgotten.
In his mind this momentary lapse of Amelia's thoughts became
typical of her world. Very likely Ethel was right. They
thought him dull and uninteresting. Very likely, too, Miss
Sanderson would have got tired of him after a while. Now that
he came to think of it, he had used his opportunity to talk to
Miss Sanderson very poorly. It was always the way. He was
dazzled by close contact with women and did not know what
to say.

He felt depressed and disheartened.

"What did you tell Ethel about us for?" he asked, looking
solemnly out of the window. One of the priceless advantages
of possessing a small mind is the power to train it upon any
problem in a flash. So with Amelia.

" She's my sister, I suppose ? " she enquired.

" Givin' me a fine name."

"What name?"

" Stick."

" Well ! " Amelia laughed suddenly. " She wasn't so far off,
was she? You know, Hanny, your mind isn't on your job.
You'll never get on if you go round fly-catchin'."

"Think not?"

" Positive. That's all Eth meant by ' stick/ I wouldn't let

CASUALS OF THE SEA 293

her call you names as a general thing, and she wouldn't want
to. But she can't help noticin'."

" You ought to 'ave left me in the Repositories/' he remarked.
" I feel all out of it 'ere, ridin' in cabs."

" And give up the shop ? " she cried.

"You can get somebody else for that job."

" Oh, don't be so silly ! I s'pose you're grousing because I
didn't like you leavin' the shop. I might have said a good deal
more'n I did this morning."

'* I noticed that. Why didn't you ? "

Amelia turned and looked at him, astounded at his perspicacity.

" I thought we had an understanding," she faltered.

" I 'ad idea that way too," he admitted.

" Then why do you ask me why didn't I fly out at you when
I noticed it? Do you think I wanted to have a row? If I'd
known you knew, I would have." And she flung herself away
from him.

" 'Ere's the 'ouse," said Hannibal as the cab drew up. He
got out, put his hand in his pocket and found a florin. He gave
it to the driver and turned to his cousin.

" I'll see Aunt Lizzie another time," he said briefly. " I've
'ad just about all I can stand for to-night."

And turning away, lie went off down the street without giving
her an opportunity to reply.

IX

ON Waterloo Bridge he paused, and leaning over one
of the embrasures studied the amazing scene spread
before his eyes. On either hand the embankment was
picked out in a curve of lights, the great hotels loomed
up on the right bank, and away westward the clock of West-
minster glowed like a yellow moon. Below, the dark water
reflected the illumination of the shores ; here and there a deep red
or green light marked a moving craft. From the Strand came
a dull roar of traffic; police whistles called shrilly for cabs;
behind him the omnibuses rumbled and carts rattled. Far away
on Westminster Bridge lights of swift hansoms sped across con-
tinually. The night was clear and warm. There was no despair
in his heart; rather was there the exultation of revolt. He had
by some strange effort, some reaction quite alien to his ordinary
apathetic attitude towards life, broken from the Brown influence.
That influence would claim him again in the morning. He had
no confidence in himself if Amelia appeared next day in a melt-
ing mood. How did he get the courage to state the facts so
bluntly? He did not know. It seemed almost as if he had
heard some one else saying it. To tell the Browns that he had
all he could stand of them — my word ! Amelia would think him
off his chump. She had said he went round catching flies, had
she? Well, he had given her something to think over now. He
was not going to be absorbed into the Brown system so easily
after all, he was not quite devoid of individuality. Miss Sander-
son had realised there was something in him. And Ethel, too,
had had a shock. As he looked out across the dark water, the
young man's eyes hardened a little. He would not give in.
Again there came to him the consciousness of his power to break
away. What did he want to do? He did not know nor care.
He would find his way' to the world he had dreamed of, never
fear. Under the stress of his thoughts he moved a little, and
became aware of a shadow. He looked up quickly to see the

294

CASUALS OF THE SEA 295

huge bulk of a policeman standing over him. He started back
with an exclamation, instinctively avoiding the law.

" You'd better get along," suggested the law. " I thought at
first you were goin' to do yourself in."

Hannibal laughed and stood back a little further from the
parapet. " Not me ! " he answered, taking out a pipe to show
his easiness under scrutiny. " I was only 'avin' a look roun'. I
don't come this way often. What's that street up there ? " He
pointed towards Covent Garden.

"Strand," said the law. "Where do you want to go?"

" 'Ome, Mile End Road/'

The policeman, who was only waiting for ten o'clock to go
eastward himself, nodded.

" Up there, and round the right. Tuppence on the 'bus."

" Thank you. Good night."

The brief conversation restored the young man's balance and
solidified his belief in himself. The recoil from the Browns'
influence led him to contemplate confiding in his mother. Now
this casual contact with the world left him standing on his feet
again. He strode on towards the Strand, and seeing an East-end
omnibus waiting across the road, ran over and sprang upon
it. The noise, the lights, the movement of the great teeming
street exhilarated him. He felt outrageously glad that he had
affronted Amelia so brazenly. He cast about him for something
that would embody his revolt. If he went home that would be
a tame ending — he would have gone home anyway. Ah, he
had it! He would have a drink, for a start. He felt in his
pocket and found a shilling and some smaller coins, about one-
and-ninepence. He regretted that florin now.

He descended at Aldgate and entered a bar. To push in and
out of a pub is part of East-end education. Even people who
are strict abstainers in that part of the world have a certain
familiarity with licenced premises. These gin-palaces, as Mrs.
Gaynor was accustomed to describe them, are the clubs of the
poor. It is necessary to remember this when reflecting upon
Hannibal's behaviour. To him and to the majority of East
Londoners, entering a public-house signified nothing. Even
to Amelia it signified nothing in itself. In the old days when
Mr. Brown was in a comically small way of business, when
Hannibal's father was buried, for instance, it was a right and
proper thing to go into bars. Now they had reached a higher

296 CASUALS OF THE SEA

plane where they were limited to hostelries like the " Bull and
Bush " and the " King's Head " at Roehampton. And it might
as well be explained here while Hannibal was entering that bar,
that Amelia would have had some trouble to explain in stark
language why she cherished such an objection to the faint odour
of liquor which lingered round her cousin when he returned to
the shop. It could not be any prejudice against drink. The
Browns were all too much alive, too interested, too intelligent
to have any craven fear of it. Possibly it was because, taking
Hannibal at his own valuation, she did not consider him one of
the family, and so came unconsciously to the conclusion that
drink was a possible vice with him. Perhaps the rumours cur-
rent when her uncle died, that he had had a drop too much,
weighed with her. Perhaps it was merely a feminine desire to
find fault with a young man who offered a too easy mark.
Whatever her ultimate motive, it would have been formidably
strengthened had she seen him now breasting the mahogany bar
asking for a bitter and selecting a match from the sheaf that
stood near his elbow.

The bar was a saloon, semicircular, with seats in the corners
of the room. As he turned to glance round after a sip, Han-
nibal was surprised to see his friend Mr. Grober in a chair
by a small table, enjoying his black briar and a tankard of ale.
The young man nodded, and Mr. Grober, regarding him with
attention, withdrew from his reverie far enough to respond.
Hannibal felt a singular excitement on beholding the old man
thus occupied. He took up his glass and went over to him.

" Good evenin'," he said. " I'd no idea you were in 'ere."

" The surprise is mutual," responded Mr. Grober. " I thought
you were engaged for the evening."

" Oh, we went to see 'er parents come back from the sea-
side," explained Hannibal. " I got sick of it and cleared out."

Mr. Grober looked at his young friend with some curiosity.

" You are fortunate," he said simply.

*"Ow d'you mean?" asked Hannibal, drinking.

" To be able to clear out, as you express it, whenever the
mood takes you. It will not be always so, believe me."

" Oh, I'm not goin' to be bossed," said Hannibal.

Mr. Grober 's face expressed pity.

" And how do you propose to avoid it ? " he asked. " When
the greatest men are ruled by women, while they have it in

CASUALS OF THE SEA 297

their power to make our lives either a hades or an elysium, how,
I ask, do you propose to escape the universal fate ? "

" Oh, it ain't as bad as that, Mister," Hannibal protested.

" You are young and time will show," said Mr. Grober.
" You imagine that your young lady is merely a female. A
woman is only a manifestation of her sex. Except in rare cases
she has no essential nature of her own. Men speak of having
been under the influence of various women. Never was there
such a puerile misconception. They are all one woman. He
escapes from one only to succumb to the enchantments of an-
other. He may fly from England to China, from China to Peru,
but it is all in vain. Ultimately she gets him, and deals out to
him the destiny ordained from the beginning. Happy the man
who can snatch some happiness in the intervals of the pursuit,
and steel his heart with philosophy against the unforeseen
tragedies of his life. You will read," continued Mr. Grober,
" you will read in that book in your pocket the story of a
fruitless attempt to evade the eternal question of sex. That is
what I mean by all women being one and the same. Woman
has been told so often that she is an angel, that she has grown
to believe it. The most cursory examination of a few examples
of women is sufficient to disprove this monstrous fallacy."

" I s'pose you're a woman-'ater, Mr. Grober," said Hannibal,
looking judicially into his pipe.

" By no means. I am merely giving you, a young and In-
experienced man, the benefit of close observation. I am what
the world calls a failure, which means I have the right to criti-
cise the world. Disraeli said of critics that they were those
who had failed in literature and art. I may transpose Disraeli's
dictum and say that failures are those who exchange success in
art or in life for the right to criticise. A little thought will
show that only the failure can pass unbiased judgment upon the
world. The majority of people imagine that because a man has
failed in this particular world, he's failed absolutely. By no
means. Many a man who sinks down and dies and is forgotten
might, by one infinitesimal turn of fortune's wheel, have landed
beside Caesar and Napoleon. Still more men who struggle furi-
ously with poverty might, by a chance movement of the hand, a
furtive roll of the eye, light upon some hidden spring which
when touched, would transfer them to an Aladdin's Palace.
Chance, chance, chance! Take myself; at any moment I may

298 CASUALS OF THE SEA

turn over an old folio and discover some document which will
draw upon me the attention of every learned society in Europe.
So far a ten thousand to one chance had been against me."

" You aren't countin' on it, I suppose ? " asked Hannibal,
whose mind was puzzled yet attracted by the old gentleman's
fluent monologue.

" I count on nothing. I am a fatalist, by which I mean that
I disbelieve in the future. It does not exist. To an age de-
bauched by erroneous systems of logic it may sound strange, but
the future does not exist."

" I am afraid that's a bit too deep for me," said the young
man. " Take me. Can't make up my mind what I'm going to
do to-morrow."

The question recalled Mr. Grober to the immediate present.

u Well," he said, finishing his beer, " I should imagine that
you can answer that question better than I."

The young man lifted his glass, glanced with a roving eye
round the glittering bar, drank off the liquor and set down the
empty glass.

" That's right," he said. " I can. I 'ave," he added.

Mr. Grober looked at the clock over his head and rose.

" I must go," he said hurriedly. " I had no idea of the time.
Come over to the shop."

They went out together through the swing doors.

" You speak as if you had made up your mind to do some-
thing extremely important," Mr. Grober began when they had
crossed the road. " Now I am ready to admit that there is one
incalculable element in human life, and that is Youth. It is
unique. If it were not for Youth there would be neither joy
nor sorrow in the world. If it were not for Youth — come in,
come in, — if it were not "

Mr. Grober's stream of eloquence was cut off short as he
entered the shop and beheld his wife standing by the inner
door. Hannibal felt acutely uneasy as he noted the light of
battle in the lady's eye. He withdrew to the book-encumbered
entry. Mr. Grober's entire personality seemed to shrivel be-
neath his wife's viperish regard. His hands faltered and made
deprecating motions in the air, he slithered sideways to his chair
and sank into it as though beaten down by the torrent of her
vituperation. There was neither skill nor meaning in her words,
but a mere unimaginative repetition of foul phrases. Hannibal

CASUALS OF THE SEA 299

was appalled, and drew further out towards the street, pretend-
ing to examine the volumes on the shelves. Not one word of
retort did the old man offer to stem the rushing flow of profane
upbraiding. He sat wilted and diminished, his arm dangling over
the back of the chair, the black briar between his fingers. Only
once, when she hurled the opprobrium " Lousy old soaker " at
him, did he move as though to reply. She was not an old
woman; had she been lapped in luxury she might have been
pretty, and at most she was forty. But the evil rage in her
heart, the gnawing penury of body and spirit had distorted and
maligned her features so that now as she svood swaying in her
passion, she might have been one of the Furies pursuing her
husband with implacable hatred.

"What d'you want?" she turned hoarsely to Hannibal.
" Standin' there listenin' ? You're like all the rest o' them,
lookin' and lookin' and puttin' 'em back, an never buyin'." She
paused, exhausted, put her right hand to her throat and coughed
weakly, making motions with her left for him to be gone. Han-
nibal stepped out into the street and paused irresolutely. Then
he walked back into the shop.

" Why, what 'ave I done, missis?" he asked boldly.

She waved him away without turning to him.

" Sling yer 'ook," she croaked, for her voice was gone. " Sling
it."

" Shan't," said Hannibal, and the old man looked up at him,
mumbling, "Youth! Youth!" to himself. "Mr. Grober 'ere
ain't said any thin' about chasin' me out, 'as 'e? "

The storm was over; Mrs. Grober repassed the inner door
and vanished. Slowly the drooping head of the old bookseller
revived.

" I regret, my young friend," he said, " that you should
have witnessed such a scene. For the young it is undoubtedly,
an unfortunate spectacle. Mrs. Grober is subject to occasional
fits of depression. Possibly the profits accruing from the sale
of second-hand literature might be larger. I may be mistaken,
but I have never heard of any one making a* million out of it.
And that is a curious feature of the profession. We have it on
the word of Monsieur Heineffethermatt that there are over a
thousand million printed volumes." Mr. Grober was off again,
his hands waving, his dull blue eye fixed on Hannibal's face.
" Let us take a conservative estimate, ten per cent for second-

300 CASUALS OF THE SEA

hand matter. That gives us one hundred millions. One per
cent of that, say, for England, which leaves at the disposal of
a hypothetical dealer one million volumes. Surely, by means of
business acumen and judicious handling of capital it would be
possible to control the sale of those million books. You need,
say, a text-book."

" I don't," grinned Hannibal.

" We will make the supposition," replied Mr. Grober gravely.
" You come to me. Having in my control the whole of the
second-hand books in the country, I maintain price. You offer a
shilling. I keep the price at two shillings, even three. You are
financially at my mercy."

" People 'Id buy new ones then," surmised Hannibal.

" Ah ! You have put your finger on an important point. The
scheme would involve negotiations with the publishers, and that
is a fatal defect. I have discovered, young man," Mr. Grober
remarked with energy, " that anything which involves negotia-
tions with a publisher is apt to prove unfortunate for the other
party.

" Were you the other party ? " asked Hannibal curiously.

" For my sins, I was," said Mr. Grober. " If you will assist
me to shut up, I will tell you about it."

"All right, mister."

Hannibal set to work at once. He put down his pipe, strode
out to the front and began tumbling the books into the boxes.
Mr. Grober turned out the gas in the front and carried in the
various cards which announced to a careless world the sacrifice
of certain special lots at prices hardly compatible with Mr.
Grober's imaginary trust. When the boxes were inside and
the shutter down, he motioned Hannibal towards the back room.
To the young man's look of scared enquiry he indicated the
ceiling with his forefinger, pursing his lips to imply that while
Mrs. Grober had retired to an upper floor, quietness would en-
sure her remaining there. With some apprehension, therefore,
Hannibal passed the glass door and found himself in a small,
dirty room furnished with sofa and chairs of dark green velvet,
an oval table with a black oil-cloth cover, and a stunted side-
board. A naked gas-burner over the table gave a scanty illumi-
nation. Mr. Grober followed, rubbing his hands. Into his
seamed and bloodless features had come a certain exultation.
Stooping before the sideboard he took from it a square bottle

CASUALS OF THE SEA 301

and two thick glasses. Setting them on the table, he regarded
them for a moment in deep thought, as though he were struggling
to realise the solemnity of the moment. Hannibal, his cap in
his hand, sat on the edge of the sofa, watching him shyly. At
length Mr. Grober, still keeping his cap on his head, removed
the cork and poured out some whisky. Then he looked round
as though he had lost something. Feeling in his pocket for
matches, he struck one and searched in a cupboard near the
window. He brought back a jug containing water.

" The lower classes of the metropolis occasionally use milk,"
he remarked, filling up Hannibal's glass and adding a tiny trickle
to his own. " I believe it is considered vulgar, though it would
puzzle a philosopher to explain why. I mentioned something
about publishers, did I not? Well, many years ago, — but drink,
my friend, drink," and he pushed the glass to the abashed Han-
nibal. A sudden vision of his mother waiting up for him at
home flashed across his mind. Was he, after all, effecting any-
thing particularly heroic by associating with this old man? And
then the great desire to press forward into experience, to pass
somehow beyond the narrow bounds which had been hemming
him in, came over him, and he lifted the glass.

He heard Mr. Grober clinking the square bottle against his
tumbler as he poured out another measure of the spirit. What
was it Mr. Grober was saying? Hannibal felt astonishingly
buoyant and optimistic. He tried to keep his attention on
Mr. Grober. " I believed in those days in the future. For
me it existed as a bright and roseate dream of ineffable power
and joy," so ran Mr. Grober's thin voice, quavering now with
excitement as the spirit pervaded his brain. " I dreamed in
my folly, that since ambition had marked me for her own, I
would find recognition, fame, wealth, ultimate illimitable happi-
ness. I deemed that, having Youth, I had every requisite to
invest the manifestation of my life with the form of Art. I —
what was I saying? Invest^ aye, a fatal word! The dam-
nable materialism of the age has covered the very language of
art with its offensive slime. Had I but lived in the glorious
days of the Renaissance, when Cellini, Michael Angelo, and
Aretino lived out their fierce and tragic lives ! "

The young man sat on the edge of the sofa listening to the
old man's wandering and incoherent speech in some perplexity.
The spirit was potent within him; his mind soared to a sense

302 CASUALS OF THE SEA

of supreme accomplishment. Mr. Grober, after all, was not
so important as he seemed to think he was. That old chap
over there was gassing away — poor old blighter! Now he,
Hannibal Gooderich, had something in him. He was going to
do something. What was it he was going to do? Never mind.
He shook his head portentously in front of Mr. Grober, who
was pointing at him with the stem of his pipe.

" Have you," asked Mr. Grober, " ever reflected that a man's
destiny may be determined by a trivial matter ? **

Hannibal shook his head. ** Don't understand," he said.

" I speak of men, not failures, not even those so-called suc-
cessful beings who plod along year after year and never muster
courage to turn and grapple with their fate. I speak of men,
not of the great majority like ourselves. We never give hostages
to fortune, we never dare to burn our ships behind us. We creep
along in the mud until the grave opens and takes us in. I speak
of men! " The old man's voice rang out on the word with an
energy and resonance that startled himself. He shrank into
himself again, listening fearfully for any sound above.

" I don't see why I shouldn't do somethin' on my own,"
whispered Hannibal. " I'm goin' to try, any'ow."

"Beard Destiny in his den? Brave youth! Think of the
millions round you. If they fail, can you succeed? "

" Who's goin' to stop me? " asked the young man.

" Yourself. Your own craven spirit ! " cried Mr Grober,
striking the table with a soundless blow. " Do you think I
have not tried it? Aye, tried, and at the first roar of the
monster I ran screaming back to my accustomed haunts. Not
for me the great world of action, not for me the glorious struggle
with unknown perils. I realised all too soon the fundamental
difference between men and men. Fear, grim Fear sent me to
my kennel, chained me there, and here you behold me. The
Philosophy of Fear! When will the genius rise to proclaim
it? Foolish dream! Grim paradox, my young friend! For if
a man be held by Fear, he will never rise to proclaim it."

" I see what you mean," said Hannibal in a new voice. " I
reckon I've got into that 'abit myself, thinkin' as I can't go
off on my own. Various things, me bein' engaged and all that
— they do make you feel kind of 'elpless."

" Bound to the Caucasus," assented Mr. Grober, pouring him-
self out more whisky.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 803

"But I've been thinkin' jus' lately that I'd like to get out
and see things. F'r instance, a friend o' mine, 'e's a sailor,
and "

" You propose to follow his example? Excellent! Tell me."

Hannibal told him. He told it disjointedly, going over the
ground with interminable repetition, growing more fluent as
he proceeded, encouraged by the nodding of the old man's
head. He told it ungrammatically and egotistically, told it to
an elderly failure with years of systematic alcoholic stimulus,
and whose brain cells were sagging with reaction, whose dull
blue eyes peered at him through the curling smoke of a mal-
odorous tobacco. He told it in a way that debars it from tran-
scription, and yet in spite of, perhaps because of this disabil-
ity, he communicated for the first time his own view of the
world; he did that thing which so many of us fail utterly to do,
he put forth his hand and touched the garment's hem of Ro-
mance, he thrilled as he felt his soul pushing slowly, blun-
deringly, yet surely through the veils of custom and law. He
saw once more those strange shapes that had haunted his child-
hood, realising suddenly how sheath after sheath of his im-
mediate life had closed round him and shut him off from that
vast rhythmic dream-world beyond. . . .

He paused, and found himself sitting strained and stiff on the
edge of the sofa, his glass in his hand, staring at the rigid
features of the old man.

" An' so," he concluded lamely, setting down the glass and
looking round in a dazed way — " an' so I thought as I might
find it agen, if I got out o' the net, see? I ain't 'ad much
education, an' I can't put it very well. That sailor-chap in
the Iceland book — when 'e was away out there, fightin', 'e
found it, such a long way from 'ome. I don't reckon you can
ever see these tilings while you're at 'ome, eh ? "

He looked into the bowl of his pipe as though he could read
the tremendous riddle in the ashes. Mr. Grober was silent for
a space, the frayed fabric of his deteriorated mind catching at
odds and ends of the narrative. An expression, of bewilderment
and grief struggled through the mask as the memory of his own
yotlth was recalled by the young man's words. A sudden vision
of himself as he might have been, had he held to his own, came
with appalling clearness before him. The rickety scaffolding
of hypocrisy, plastered with the gaudy lying show-cards of

304 CASUALS OF THE SEA

quack philosophy, which concealed his failure from his own eyes,
fell away.

He closed his eyes for a moment, close-locked in his own mute
agony, and then reached for the bottle. The young man had
not asked him for advice, had not craved his judgment upon
the world, and he felt the unconscious slight. He was nothing,
a mere vacuum in the surrounding density, a vacuum which had
sucked from the lad his story. He bowed his head as though
to the decree of an invisible fate.

"I — I am scarcely in a position to say," he remarked in a
dull, spiritless voice. " My own experience of the great arena
of action has not been exactly exhilarating."

Hannibal sat unheeding, absorbed in his own gnarled and
tangled thoughts. The clink of the bottle against the glass
roused him. He looked round to see the time.

" I must get along," he said, standing up. " The old woman'll
be wonderin* where I've got to."

" Have another drink," said Mr. Grober, filling his glass.
" Success to your new resolutions. I wish — I wish — but never
mind, my wishes generally escape the notice of providence. I
shall merely wish you joy of your adventure."

Once more Hannibal swallowed the strange liquor that felt
like hot velvet in his throat and sent a shiver through him,
and then he took his cap.

" Goo' night, mister," he said. " I'll look in agen."

" Like a ship passing in the night," said the old man, his dull
blue eyes straying over Hannibal as they passed into the shop.
There was a sound of footsteps overhead, a creak of the stairs,
and Mr. Grober's expression changed. Tiptoing across the floor,
Hannibal let himself out.

" Good night ! " whispered the old man, peering forward with
strained, ghastly features. " I give you a crumb of wisdom —
not mine, alas! Be master of yourself. The world is not an
oyster to be opened, but a quicksand to be passed. If you have
wings you can fly over it, if not you may — yes, yes, I am com-
ing now, my dear! — you may quite possibly be sucked in."

The door closed abruptly and Hannibal found himself under
the huge dome of the starlit sky. For a moment he looked up
and down the broad thoroughfare with its endless rows of street
lamps, its late tram clanking up from Mile End, its occasional
swirl of yellow radiance from tavern or ham-and-beef shop, its

CASUALS OF THE SEA 305

hurrying pedestrians and leisurely policemen. Oblivious of the
ferment in his brain, the world was settling down to a few hours
of rest. Hannibal set forward, crossing the road in front of the
tram. The lateness of the hour — for the East End is unlike the
West in this — came to him with fresh force, and he hurried on.
Assembly Passage seemed unusually long in the darkness. Its
one lamp, bracketed high up and flaring through a broken pane,
flung a darting and ghostly light athwart shutters and windows.
Emerging into Jubilee Street, he saw a light in the front room.
The old lady was waiting up for him. A shadow rose and
crossed the blind as the gate whined at his touch.

"Why, Hanny, wherever have you been? I was gettin'
anxious."

He told her briefly, flinging his cap on a chair and sitting on
the sofa to unlace his boots. Mrs. Gooderich followed him in
and stood watching him.

" I've had a visit," she said, sitting by the table and leaning
her chin on her hand. " I've had a visit from Minnie."

Hannibal, flushed with stooping, raised his eyes to his mother's
face.

"Eh?" he said blankly. Mrs. Gooderich repeated the re-
mark.

" After all this time ? " he queried.

" After all this time."

"What'd she say?"

" She was very quiet," said Mrs. Gooderich. " Very quiet."
And then she added as an afterthought: " She always was."

M She ain't — comin' — 'ere? "

" No," said Mrs. Gooderich. " She isn't."

"What'd she come for?"

" To tell me she was goin' to be married."

"Ah!"

"She's a fine lady now, by her clo'es. Do you know what
that means, Hanny?"

Mrs. Gooderich's face was pale with resolution. She too had
been going through a crisis. The sudden apparition of her
daughter had flung her thoughts around her son. It was time
Hanny was told certain things. Hannibal set his boots down
in a corner and shook his head.

" I'm tired," he said, rubbing his eyes. »

"What's the matter?" said his mother sharply.

306 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Bit worried/' he answered. " 'Ad some words with Amy.
She's always gettin' at me."

" Oh, Hanny ! " Mrs. Gooderich sprang up. " You aren't goin'
to spoil everything now! Think what it means to me." And
she made a gesture of despair.

" It ain't my fault/' he argued. " I can't 'elp it. I don't
reckon we'd get on very well. We ain't Uncle George's sort,
any'ow. You know, mother," he went on, his hands in his
pockets, " I feel sometimes in that shop as if I'd go off me head.
I seem to be jus' rottin' there. And if I been thinkin' as 'ow
it's got to come some day, so it might as well come now. I'm
goin' to try and do somethin' on me own."

" What ? " she asked dully, sitting down again. " You goin'
that way, too ? "

" It's like bein' in prison," he said, " since I left off goin'
about with the chaps. Prison, excep' 'avin' somethin' to read. I
been thinkin' a lot lately an' I want to clear out."

" I see you readin' Flotsam the other day," said Mrs. Goode-
rich. " You'll be flotsam if you don't take care. I was afraid
you'd be gettin' ideas."

" I don't care," he growled. " Better be flotsam than moochin'
in a tobacconist's all me life. Little Brown Box, Little Brown
Box. Eh? Stop there till I'm ready for another little brown
box? Ugh!"

" What can you do ? " she asked, distressed.

" I'll find somethin'. Mr. Grober, 'e ses ' be your own master.'
So I will. I don't want no Uncle Georges nor Aunt Elizas
neither. All very well for them with their seaside an' cabs an'
nice 'ouses. Let 'em 'ave it. I'm goin' me own road, damn
'em."

" Hanny, you mustn't say such things ! "

" I tell you I am ! What'd you want to go to 'im for, any-
way? I could 'a' got another job without 'im. They're only
makin' a convenience o' me, any'ow."

Mrs. Goodericli was silent. Minnie, sitting there cool and
composed that afternoon, had said the same thing in other
words, had offered her mother money, which had been refused
with scorn.

"Ain't she comin' any more, then?" he asked suddenly, re-
calling his mother's news,

CASUALS OF THE SEA 307

" I don't know. She said something about lookin' in again
to-morrow."

" An' she's goin' to be married ? Who to ? "

A shadow crossed his mother's face.

" She says he's in a very good position, and they've been
waitin'. She says 'e put up the money for that business o'
theirs in Sloane Street, and those 'olidays she 'ad on the Conti-
nent. I don't understand it myself. People don't give you
money, if they don't want somethin' in return, especially men."

" Well," said Hannibal, yawning, " she's done all right for
herself, I should reckon. Any supper, mother? "

Mrs. Gooderich rose to get him something to eat.

" It's past twelve," she remarked reprovingly. " I don't think
you ought to stay out so late."

" I wasn't out," he retorted testily. " I was sittin' in the
room behind the shop, talkin*. That's where it is," he con-
tinued, " all the time, you an* Amy. You don't think this, you
don't think that! Why can't you lea* me alone? I ain't Jack
the Ripper, am I? Nag, nag, nag!"

He plumped himself down and began to eat in sullen silence.

" I'm your mother, I think." Mrs. Gooderich intended to
convey cutting sarcasm. " By the way you fly out at me, I
might be dirt. Minnie's the same, she always was. I did think
you were goin* to be different, Hanny. I did think Amy was
going to make a man of you."

" Amy can get somebody else to make a man of," he replied.
" I'm no use to 'er. She as good as told me I went round
catchin' flies, my mind ain't on me work, and all the rest of it.
She's got the idea she can bat me round jus' as she likes."

" Then you must have been doin' something or other," said his
mother.

" I went to get a drink an' some change, an' I was away from
the shop about a minute, that's what I was doin*. That was
only an excuse! I ain't their sort down at Kennington. She
come down to ol' Grober's shop this evenin' wi' me, and turns
up her nose at the place. Don't approve of 'im, I s'pose. Every
bally thing I do is wrong. The kitten was all wrong too — an'
jus' because she's got the tin. She can 'ave it."

" Oh, I am sorry you can't get on there, Hanny. You know,
she's right in a way. You do need someone to look after you."

308 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" No use arguhV," he answered. " Let's go to bed. My 'ead
aches."

" You smoke too much," began his mother.

" Oh, drop it, do," he cried desperately. " Do say somethin*
without frndin* fault. What am I made of? Tell me that!
What am I made of? Wouldn't it drive anybody balmy? "

And without waiting for his mother's reply, he went out and
shut the door behind him.

WHEN Hannibal had washed his hands in his little
basin behind the counter after sweeping out the
shop, polishing the brasswork, dusting the rows of
canisters, replenishing the canaries' seed-pots and
the match-jars that stood by the cigar-cutter, he took up a book-
let that had been lying on the floor by the gate when he had ar-
rived. It was an attractive little pamphlet, with a sap-green
cover on which was represented a young man with sharp, clean-
shaven jaws holding his crooked fingers over the floating form
of a young lady lightly clad. In eye-piercing lettering the title
ran Raising the Dead. Desirous of knowing something about
this subject, Hannibal silenced the inner voice that told him it
was only an advertisement for a Pill, and sat down to investi-
gate.

Outside was a May morning. Even Billiter Lane was of
cheerful aspect. Clerks, hasting to their offices or to the Baltic
Exchange, vendors of violets, bananas and dates, maps of Lon-
don and copies of shipping newspapers, made the little dark
canyon between the great blocks of buildings seem gay and
debonair. The kitten, witli her blue ribbon askew on her neck,
sat by the door and carried out an exhaustive personal examina-
tion. From Fenchurch Street came the drone of a great traffic,
punctuated at intervals by the call of a newsman or hoot of a
motor horn, hoarse, poignant, and unmusical.

Hannibal read the pamphlet in some perplexity. It implored
him to pause and realise the terrific power which lay latent
within him. This power was described as Hypnotic Suggestion.
Up to the present this power had been used merely for such
trivial purposes as medical science had indicated. That was
now to be changed. He, the reader of that booklet, had power
to raise the dead. Was this an exaggeration? By no means.
People without ambition were dead, practically speaking. We
referred to such as " dead to the world." That was to end right
away. That dead ambition was to be resuscitated. Why did
people remain in this coma of inaction? Why did people find

810 CASUALS OF THE SEA

it so difficult to succeed? Because they did not know their work.
Inefficiency! the booklet replied in double leaded capitals.
Why did they not know their work? Because they did not
utilise the amazing facilities of the Pallas Athene School of
Tuition by Correspondence. Never mind others. Hypnotise
yourself. Raise yourself from the dead wreck of inefficients.
Nowadays the incompetent man was kicked out. He was
scrapped. His ultimate destination was the casual ward. He
lay under sentence of death before the Bar of the Modern Busi-
ness World.

Hannibal, with some misgivings, stared at the illustrations.
There was Pallas Athene leaping full-armed from the head of
Jupiter, for your really smart advertiser has no time to dis-
criminate between the mythologies; there was a trembling in-
efficient standing before a court of stern captains of industry,
who were sentencing him to death; there was a broad-shoul-
dered efficient sitting at an immense roll-top desk, with a back-
ground of scores of other inferior efficients toiling at type-
writers; there were little pictures of young Arabs, Russians,
Japanese, and Hindoos, poring over the sheets issued by the
Pallas Athene School. Occasionally wetting his thumb to turn
the thick, highly-glazed pages, Hannibal went through the pam-
phlet over and over again. He wondered if Mr. Grober had re-
ceived one. Most probably. And what would Mr. Grober think
of it? Here was Mr. Grober's teaching in a modern and biting
form. At the end was a page of " Axiomatic Aphorisms, the
Double-distilled Quintessence of Philosophic Thought, boiled
down and left in a cool place to set." As thus : —

'* Jupiter reached Danae in the shape of a shower of gold.
It was the only way he could reach her."

" A man can do the same — go through towers of brass — if
he has the gold."

" We show him how to get the gold."

He laid it aside at length, and went to the door to think.
He stood there in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a cigarette and
trying to arrange things in his mind. Was there any truth after
all in that little green book? Was it a certain thing that he,
having a desire not to amass gold, nor acquire a position among
captains of industry, but to see this great wonderful world in
which he had been born, and enjoy the beauty of it — was it

CASUALS OF THE SEA 311

certain he was doomed to sink down into the mire and die?
He felt greatly perturbed. He had a sort of panicky feeling
whenever he compared himself with those same captains of
industry, those rigid-featured geniuses who think in millions.
Once he had read in a weekly paper an account of the marvel-
lous career of one Sir Anthony Gilfillan, the inventor of those
same Gilfillan Filaments which illuminated the Little Brown
Box. He had read Sir Anthony's maxims for success. The
faked photograph of the man, with deep-sunken eyes and bulging
brow, had given him that panicky feeling. And he had won-
dered why his mother, seeing the picture, had taken the paper
away from him. To tell the truth, when Hannibal read of these
great men, that they had once been poor boys like himself, he
did not believe it. They may have been in moderate circum-
stances, but they had had some sort of luck. And as he grew
up, there had grown up along with him a dim conviction that
the cause of their success was their intense desire for it.
So that in the end, Hannibal and Mrs. Gaynor and the Pallas
Athene School had all arrived at the same simple psychological
fact, so ably expressed by Mrs. Gaynor herself when she said
that many people fail to get what they wish because they don't
wish hard enough.

Hannibal decided, as he stood there beside the kitten, looking
out into the street, that very likely these efficient folk were
right. But there came his difficulty. He could not see why, if a
fellow like himself wanted to look on at the show, he couldn't
do it without being considered a criminal. Everything he him-
self took an interest in seemed to have no money value. There
was Tiny Tim the kitten, Bob and Bill the canaries. He loved
them, loved to watch them and feel that they knew him. It
was a great deal to him that the canaries would jump on his
finger if he put it between the bars, that Tiny Tim would
climb upon his shoulder and go to sleep as he sat behind the
counter reading. And although a certain diffidence of soul led
him to say nothing to Amelia about it, he loved the flowers too.
They did not shout at him that he was not succeeding in life,
that he was guilty of inefficiency, that he must get on or get
out; and yet, for all that, they told him many things. So too
with books and pictures. I have mentioned some of the books
with which Mr. Grobcr supplied him, but I have not mentioned
the ever-present influence of the bookstall and picture shop.

312 CASUALS OF THE SEA

There were certain windows before which the young man always
paused, windows in which were pictures. There was one which
had given him a great deal of pleasure, a painting of a wide
stretch of green, rolling Atlantic, and it was called " Across the
Western Ocean." He was sorry when that picture was taken
away. But all this was of no profit to him, according to the
Pallas Athene School. Of what use, they asked, were fine ideas
and delicate thoughts if you made no money out of them? And
he sighed as his attention was drawn to two men who emerged
from the office of the steamship company across the way and
came over towards him. One of them was a short, thick-set
little man with a beard, who carried a brown leather satchel like
a young lady's music-case. Hannibal retreated behind the
counter. They entered, and when the little man had ordered
some fine-cut pipe tobacco, continued talking.

" And there's nothing else, I suppose, Captain? " said the tall
young man, whom Hannibal had served occasionally.

The gentleman addressed as Captain, busy lighting a cigar,
shook his head. He had laid his satchel on the counter and
Hannibal could read the name on it in sloping gilt letters:

s.s. Caryatid.

Hannibal placed the required canister on the counter and
looked respectfully at the Captain.

" The chief said he wanted a lad," said the latter, putting
down some silver. " I don't think he can get anybody here ;
he doesn't know London much. I said I'd mention it while I
was up in the City."

" Why doesn't he go to the Sailors' Home ? " said the young
man, lighting a cigarette.

" He can't get away. And besides, he says he doesn't want a
lad who's been to sea before. They know too much. Always
trouble with 'em." He looked up and saw Hannibal's strained,
attentive face.

" D'you know anybody ? " he asked abruptly.

"What — what sort o' job, sir?" stammered Hannibal.

" Mess-room Steward. Good job for a handy lad."

"On a ship, sir?"

" Sure."

" Yes, sir, I know somebody."

CASUALS OF THE SEA SIS

*' Goin* right away ? "

" Think so, sir." Hannibal put down the change.

The Captain took it up and pointed to the name of the ship on
the satchel.

" Victoria Dock. Sailin' to-morrow. He'd better go down
and see the Chief to-day. Say Captain Briscoe sent him down."

" Yes, sir."

They went out and other customers came in, the usual ten-to-
eleven stream, and Hannibal served them like one in a trance.
What a strange world it was! Here was a job on a ship; and
this determined little man, in his dark blue suit and bowler hat,
his slow authoritative manner and freckled hairy hands, seemed
to have a different view of life to those appallingly efficient peo-
ple who had printed that pamphlet about Raising the Dead.
Hannibal wondered if he had after all dreamt it. Here was a
job where the holders of it could easily know too much. Was it
not too good to be true? Surely this was an oversight on the
part of the Pallas Athene School of Efficiency.

He turned it over in his mind as he served the customers.
He hardly dared think of the thing to which he was com-
mitted. To desert the shop and Amelia, to trample on the
Brown Ideals! The s.s. Caryatid. He looked out across the
street at the picture. Was that the Caryatid in some far-dis-
tant port? The kitten jumped on the counter and rubbed her-
self against him unnoticed. One thing cheered Hannibal im-
mensely, and that was the promptness with which he had seized
the opportunity. After all, it was strange that skippers of
steamers had not patronised the shop before. Another character-
istic of the affair gave him a certain comfort. It almost seemed
as if the control of things had passed out of his hands. It was
fate. He was destined to go away.

And then he came down to earth again as he thought of
Amelia. He had left her with frightful abruptness the night
before; would he be able to carry on that attitude when she
came in to-day? He felt sadly that he would not. He figured
her trim figure suddenly appearing at the door, her bright nod
of the head, her rapid glance round the shop to see if all
was right, her brisk inspection of the cash-register. How she
did take hold, to be sure! What was he to do? He tried to
avoid thinking of what he was to do, tried to fix his mind on
the ship. A feeling of delicious terror ran through him as

SU CASUALS OF THE SEA

he thought of the strangeness of the life to which he had com-
mitted himself by his headlong plunge into Captain Briscoe's
conversation. He recalled that visit to the Docks with Mrs.
Gaynor and Hiram, the great spars of the Cygnet overhead,
with the sails dropped partly down to dry, the immaculate
cleanliness (so different, by the way, from steamer cleanliness,
or even workhouse cleanliness), the air of invisible authority that
informed every movement, the mystery of curtained port-holes
and impregnable teak doors. And now if he did as he had
promised, he was to see that life complete, he would step aboard
of this steamer, the Caryatid, and she would bear him outward
on the tide, beyond the mud of the estuary, out into the sharp
cool air and cloud-rimmed circle of the heaving sea. He caught
his breath quickly as he tried to frame for himself out of his igno-
rance some credible presentment of a streetless and mobile
existence. There would be no Little Brown Box. His imagina-
tion staggered and halted before that for a while, for he had
grown up among little brown boxes of various kinds, he had
lived in spirit for many years in a little brown box. He re-
membered his father in a brown box in the front room. And
when they had left Maple Road their belongings went into a
brown box. He could hardly conceive of an existence apart from
that emblem of discreet security. And yet, had he not read
with vague gropings towards ultimate liberty, of folk who dwelt
far out beyond the Narrow Seas, who lived casual lives, sorrow-
ful sometimes indeed, but free?

Leaning on the counter, his head on his hands, he fell into
a waking dream of the future. The kitten crouched by the
door in the shaft of warm sunlight that struck slantwise into
the street, and the canaries twittered and trilled riotously above
him. So his cousin found him when she came, and remembered
it afterward, that pose of quiet distraction and the vacancy of the
eye which he turned upon her when he spoke. A shadow crossed
her smiling face when she saw it. She had been inclined to
forgiveness as she came through the sunlit streets, though his
behaviour had been very reprehensible. Rancour had but small
place in the Brown character, and she had deflected the enquiries
of her relatives with jocular evasions. But here he was again,
up in the clouds !

" I was getting anxious," she said. " Last night you were so
short I thought you must be ill. What was the matter ? "

CASUALS OF THE SEA 815

He stood up, and the kitten having sprung in friendly agility
on the counter, he brushed her away. The crisis was come, and
he had no glib phrase to hide under.

" I'd' know," he said. " We all get the 'ump at times."

" The hump," she flared. " A nice way to describe it. Tell
me to my face you have had as much as you can stand of us and
call it the hump." And she took a handkerchief from her
pocket and held it to her nose, keeping her eyes fixed upon him.
This was, I think, because she could not trust her mouth as she
could her eyes, frequently the case with young women of the
Brown type. A slow colour flooded Hannibal's cheeks and the
eyelids over the brown eyes flickered ominously.

Amelia failed to read her cousin's face accurately. She imag-
ined him humiliated. She had done very well at school, but
there were some things she could not understand. She could
not understand anyone in their senses saying such a thing as
Hannibal had said. She lived in an England which of all the
Englands known to man is immune from criticism, the England
of the Middle Classes. This England is told, day in and day
out, that they do the work, fight the battles, pay the taxes, up-
hold the Flag, and maintain the kingdom of God at a time when
lords and wage-earners are fallen away. They do not strike
and throw the nation into the periodical paroxysms that are " so
bad for trade." They do not congest the Divorce Courts with
the muck and garbage of their undisciplined concupiscence.
They are respectable. In their orderly millions they fill their
microscopic destinies and their tombs. Those who would smile,
let them look well into this matter!

Amelia Brown was aware instinctively of the titanic weight
of class-consciousness behind her. She and her kind valued their
conception of the conduct of life as the goal towards which
others aimed but never readied. The idea that there might be a
side of the question which she could not see did not occur to
her as she stood watching him. And she saw him, as she thought,
humbled and without a word to say for himself.

" It's gettin' to be a habit with you," she went on as he did
not speak. " It isn't as if you were that smart you could
afford to be saucy. You were half asleep just now."

" No," he said, lifting his hand in gentle deprecation. " Not
'alf asleep. Only thinkin'."

" Not thinkin' of anything to put money in your pocket."

316 CASUALS OF THE SEA

To her surprise he lifted his head and looked at her with a
quiet eye.

" No/' he agreed, " it wasn't. You're quite right there."

She put up her hands and took off her hat with an irritable
movement.

" I can see what it is. I'll have to do it all," she muttered,
as though in conclusion to some previous train of embittered
thought. " I don't see why you couldn't bring your dinner with
you," she went on, reverting to the moment. " Aunt Mary
could have something hot for you at night. That's what John
does."

Hannibal seemed impressed with John's habits.

" Ah," he said, " I might do that certainly."

She looked at him curiously.

" You're sensible enough now," she told him. " Go and get
your dinner. I want to get back to mother."

Obediently he took his cap and stepped to the door. He
paused for a moment as though he was going to speak. He
even turned towards her, looked up at the ceiling, and then,
laughing gently, went out.

And never went back.

XI

THE Caryatid, in ballast, was steaming down the river at
half-speed, and Hannibal, after the most strenuous
twenty-four hours of his life, was leaning over the bul-
warks and watching the coast-line slide ever away
from him. He was at sea. He could feel the beat of the en-
gines down below him, the rattle of the rudder-chains in the
wheel-house, the occasional deep clang of the telegraph as the
pilot altered her speed to slow or fast, after the manner of pilots.
Far below him the turbid waters of the Thames received the out-
pouring discharge water from the pumps, great curved cataracts
of yellowish foam. It was evening, and the City lay behind them
wrapped in crimson and purple gauze as the sunset strove to
pierce the great pall that hangs for ever over London.

Hannibal took a long breath as he looked out over the Essex
flats and tried to fix those grey distances, those mist-blurred
forms of chimney and tower, in his memory. And a breeze
with a tang of salt in it came up the river and ruffled his damp
hair deliciously. He turned away with a feeling of triumph in
his heart. He had done it at last, done something on his own,
something, moreover, that was unheard of among the Browns,
something disreputable. He had run away to sea. Certainly
there had been a great deal of red tape about that signing on
in the Shipping Office, but for all that the essential vagabondage
was there. He had no doubt that Amy was finished with him
for ever. What a base trick he had played upon her. To go
away without a word, to leave her to look after her own shop.
Was there ever a more diabolically ingenious scheme to wring
the Brown withers? He tried to imagine her there in the shop
the previous afternoon waiting, waiting. . . .

They were all busy on deck coiling up ropes and putting on
tarpaulins, and Hannibal went along the alley way to his room
on the port side which he shared with another lad who was
" on deck." He wanted to think out how it had all come about.
And indeed he had a great deal to think of. For when he had
reached home the night before, his mother had confronted him

317

318 CASUALS OF THE SEA

with a pale drawn face, and over his mother's shoulder he
had seen another face, a face framed in a large hat, with steady
dark blue eyes and slightly smiling mouth, the face of his sister.
And when his mother had said, " Hanny, this is Minnie," he
had said, " Ullo," as though they had parted the day before.

" You've grown," she told him, and then had taken but little
notice of him. Evidently he had come in upon a scene. He
could not gather a great deal of it, but it referred to a plan
Minnie had suggested. His mother would have none of it at
first. Minnie was going to marry someone she had met abroad.
They were to be married — he remembered Minnie laid great
stress on that — and then he was going abroad again, and she
was going to live in a flat off the King's Road, Chelsea. Hanni-
bal gathered that the difficulty lay in his mother's doubt of
this story. For Minnie suggested that her mother should come
and live with her, and Mrs. Gooderich, with an unusual imagina-
tion, pictured herself being lured into countenancing a menage
which was not respectable.

It is easy to make fun of Mrs. Gooderich and her ball-fringe
morality; but to her it was not funny, it was not trivial. To
her it was the very plinth of her life. She might be poor and
stupid and shiftless. She might be only a sort of glorified
charwoman, but she would fight like a tigress for that thing
she had so nearly forfeited years ago. She had never forgotten
during the long dragging years of wifehood, that her husband
had lifted her from the nameless women. But she waited in
vain for any note of gratitude in her daughter's voice. Minnie
seemed to feel she was conferring a favour upon this man whom
she had met abroad. Mrs. Gooderich could not understand
that. She could not understand why there should be so much
going away in her daughter's life. There was a certain quality
in Mrs. Gooderich's mind which an electrician would call re-
sistance. She possessed sufficient conductivity to carry the ordi-
nary current of her life, but these critical moments of high
tension were full of difficulty. I think it was this resistance
which roused Minnie to irony, and gave Hannibal an uneasy
feeling that there was what he called " A row on." He was
disconcerted, for he wanted to explode his own bomb. He
wanted to tell his mother he had run away from the Little
Brown Box. But since he had come in about his usual time his
mother had not given him a chance.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 319

He had made his chance, however, end he had had the
satisfaction of making them both look at him very intently
indeed. He was quite unaware of the fact that this ability to
make people look hard at you is one of the most highly-prized
faculties in the world.

"Old lady," he had interrupted, "why don't you? You'll
be all alone 'ere, 'cause I'm goin' away now."

" You ! "

"Ah, I 'eard of a job and went down to see the ship and I
got it. Three pound a month and all found. You'd better
go to Minnie."

"A ship, Hanny?" Minnie had asked.

" Ah, a steamer — the Caryatid."

" The Cary — / * Mother and son were looking at each other,
and did not see Minnie put her knuckles to her lips and draw
back as if to avoid a blow.

"What are you going as?" Minnie now asked, arranging
her draperies as she sat on the chair by the window. And he
had told her and watched her face assume its usual expression
of cool composure.

Mrs. Gooderich had sat looking at her son, too dazed to
straighten out her tangled ideas. It was staggering enough to
have Minnie come back. But to have, on top of that, Hannibal
going away, was too much for her frayed intellect. She sat
there struggling in vain to comprehend it.

" And we're sailin' to-morrow," he had informed her.

"What did Amy say?" she managed to ask him, and her
horror when he confessed that he had not told Amy about his
intention was manifest and acute. Brother and sister looked at
each other. Evidently what Amy would say was of importance
to their mother. Unconsciously they behaved as Ethel and
Amelia had behaved towards the elder woman who sat with her
chin in her hand. What was she to do? All her fair plans for
her boy's future were to be shoved aside. He was going on
his own. In spite of herself she felt a weight of responsibility
lifted from her shoulders. Then there remained Minnie. How
familiar it seemed, to have to consider Minnie's existence! But
now it was Minnie who was in the wrong. Surely, surely Minnie
was in the wrong. And yet, as she groped freely among the
facts, she began to wonder why it was Minnie did not behave
as a prodigal daughter should. She did nothing of the kind.

320 CASUALS OF THE SEA

She sat there with her nice clothes, her carefully manicured nails,
her pale delicate face, and exhaling a perfume that filled the
room and added to her mother's dismay. There was nothing in
her attitude to indicate contrition or even maidenly alarm at her
approaching nuptials. And here she was calmly suggesting that
her mother would translate herself from her lowly casual con-
dition and come and live with her. As in a dream she heard the
clear voice expounding a philosophy from which she shrank.
" What good has Uncle George done you, anyhow, mother ?
An honest living ! And he our uncle ! He ought to be ashamed
of himself. He sends his own wife to Bournemouth and gives
you an office-cleaning job. ... I don't care. You tell me I've
cut myself off from you. That's all rubbish. I simply went
my own way to make a living without asking help from Uncle
George or anybody else. I've done it, too, and how much worse
am I than many a married woman who hasn't any excuse? A
lot I care for what they think. A woman like Marie Letellier is
worth fifty of them. So am I for that matter. I must say
you're very hard to satisfy, mother. I sent you money, and
you sent it back. That's your own affair. Now I come and
offer you a home independent of Uncle George and his crew,
and you tell me I'm not respectable. H'm! You're as bad
as the man I'm going to marry. His relations have had him
under their thumb all his life."

And then Mrs. Gooderich had tried to tell her daughter of
that early time, that terrible time when she had gone home in
shame and silence to bear a nameless child, but she had failed,
had wandered away into other matters, so that Minnie had
lost patience and said: "Mother, listen. I've got my own
reason for not telling you who it is I'm going to marry. The
reason is I've learned to make quite sure of things before I
count on them. For some time back I've been with Marie
Letellier, and I've been earning my living sewing. I'm not
much use at that, never was, and I can only just manage it.
I've done that because — well, because he asked me to. I don't
quite know how to explain why I like him, but I do. He's
genuine, as far as his relations let him. He — he gave his own
name and address, and I didn't. But when I'm married he's
going to give me half-pay to keep house with, and that's twelve
pounds a month. And as he'll be away a good deal, I want
you to live with me. I can tell you this: he's in a good

CASUALS OF THE SEA 321

profession, and he wouldn't touch a builder with his umbrella."

"It's not ?" Mrs. Gooderich had begun.

" No, it's not," Minnie had replied. " He went a long time
ago. He's Sir Anthony now. Don't talk about him. We went
our own ways."

And then Hannibal had come in with his bomb and exploded
it among them. He was going to sea and was sailing to-morrow.

" The Caryatid you said? " Minnie had asked. " How funny."

And then he had gone on to tell her how he had seen the
chief and got the job, how his room-mate, a sailor boy, had
shown him round and offered to help him get some dunnage.
And he was going to meet him at seven o'clock at Aldgate, and
would have to hurry with his tea. The word tea had roused
his mother. That was a side of his character to which she could
always respond. And how curiously commonplace had been
his parting with his sister. He had seized his cap and turned to
her irresolutely, and she had nodded over her teacup and said,
" Be a good boy on the Caryatid, Hanny." And he had gone
out and hurried to Aldgate to meet his new chum, who took
him to a shop where he had ordered a blanket and a bolster and
a sailor's bag. He had been so full of his own affairs he had
almost forgotten Minnie by the time he had got back to Jubilee
Street once again. His mother, her face grey in the lamplight,
had confronted him. Amelia had been, Amelia with thin lips
and a bright spot in each cheek, Amelia refusing to sit down,
so that her cousin Minnie had been able to sit with her back to
the light and look her over at her leisure. Mrs. Gooderich's
insulation had almost broken down altogether, so tense had
been the encounter. She had wrung her hands and blamed

herself, to which Amelia would not agree. But ! She had

gone again, coldly, had promised to write, but it was all over.
Mrs. Gooderich was sure she need never look to Kennington
again.

And Minnie's cool, clear enunciation had cut into her be-
wailing like a sword through flesh. " Can't you see, mother,
they only want to make a convenience of you? I suppose
Hanny 's been working for her for half the wages of a stranger.
Engaged? Rubbish! What if they have been walking out?
Mother, you're a hopeless fossil. Girls get engaged three times
a month nowadays. It gives them a thrill, silly fools. Engage-
ment's nothing."

S22 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" But she feels it ! " Mrs. Gooderich had protested.

M I daresay. Gave her a nasty jolt, finding out all of a sud-
den he'd slipped." And then seeing the spasm in her mother's
face she had relented: "Well, anyway, I believe Hanny'll do
better if he starts out on his own like this than sticking to the
Browns. Good Lord, mother, he isn't going to commit mur-
der!"

" It's a wild life," his mother had whimpered.

" Oh, it is, is it ? I could tell you something about it if I
liked. Mother, I'm going to marry a sea-captain. There!
Now are you satisfied? That's why he's to be away so much."

The mother's universe had been tottering for some time, and
then it nearly capsized. She had thanked God with many
tears that a working man had deigned to marry her and give her
a name, and yet here was Minnie triumphantly closing her career
of shame by wedding a professional man.

"And you want me to live with you?" she had queried,
after Amelia had faded away.

" After we are married, and you shall have the certificate if
you like," said Minnie emphatically. " I don't know whether
you will understand me, but if there's one thing I hate more
than being suspected of something I haven't done, it's being
forgiven for something I have done. So don't let's have any
fuss. The ship is going to Swansea, and if we can't get married
to-morrow, he'll come back next week from Swansea. That's
why I'm not anxious to blab. He may be drowned, he may be
killed in a railway accident, he may drop dead, he may change
his mind and I'll never see him again. You can't tell you've
got a man until the papers are signed. I've seen too much of
woman's sweet trusting nature and man's noble habits to have
any illusions about them ! "

" You'd never listen to anythin' I was to say," Mrs. Goode-
rich had remarked forlornly, and the exquisitely dressed creature
had risen and come over to her. " There's no need to worry
over that, mother. I've learned a good deal in the last three
or four years, and if I can't take care of myself, I'm sure
you won't be able to help me. I suppose " — here Minnie had
laughed — "I suppose you think because I'm well dressed and
use scent I'm a helpless sort of woman. Think, mother, think.
I may be a rogue, I may be a fool; I can't be both. I'm not a
fool for making you this offer, am I? I do it because you are

CASUALS OF THE SEA 323

my mother, however much we differ, because you ought to rest
now, and, most of all, because I hate the Browns and want you
to be quit of them. Mother, do! Do the same as Hanny has
done. Don't go to these offices any more. Just don't go. Let
Uncle George explain it as he likes and be damned to him!"
In her excitement, all the more terrible because it was so rare,
she had clutched her mother's shoulder, and her mother had
flinched from the pain of ft. And then recovering herself,
powdering her face in a little mirror drawn from her bag, she
had smiled again and kissed her mother.

" I'll let you know as soon as I can," she had said, and so had
gone into the night, firing the respectable curiosity of the Bo-
hemian family behind their curtains.

It had certainly cleared the air, for when Hannibal returned
his mother had made up her mind to do something. It was as
though the chambers of her mind had been swept by a mighty
rushing wind which had cleared out the accumulated detritus
of the years, and left her wan and reluctantly sane. It was not
in her nature to do what Minnie had urged: to drop her brother-
in-law and his employment. She would have to retire by easy
stages. But to have inured her mind to two such revolutionary
ideas in one evening, to desert Mr. Brown and permit Hanny to
go to sea — no wonder her face was grey and drawn when Hanny
returned to supper.

He had had a momentary panic, he remembered, when he
had learned that Amelia had put in an appearance. But his
mother's news that Minnie was going to marry a sea-captain
drove out all thought of the Brown family. That was very
curious indeed. Fancy Minnie doing that. But even Minnie,
dominant as she was, did not hold him long. He was hungry,
he had made a new chum, he was to be on board the ship at
five o'clock the next morning. A youth of eighteen recks little
of his sister's affairs in such circumstances.

"Five o'clock!" Mrs. Gooderich had echoed blankly. "I'll
never get you up before six." But she had forgotten that the
tense excitement of the adventure would keep him floating on
the very edge of slumber all night, and indeed he was on his
feet soon after three that morning, padding round in his bare
feet and knocking dishes over in his nervous anxiety to save her
trouble. She asked him when he was coming back, having
years of separation in her mind; and when he said he didn't

324 CASUALS OF THE SEA

know, as the ship had no orders yet, she looked grave and
piteously lonely in the twilight of the passage. So he remem-
bered her now as he sat in his berth listening to the thud of the
engines and the boots clouting on the deck over his head, a
grey-faced old woman in a yellow flannel wrapper with her
hands on his breast. He remembered with a feeling of almost
uneasy shame how he had towered over her, his bundle of
clothes in his hand, how, when he had gone out and closed the
gate, he had looked back and seen her peering from behind the
door, a bewildered pathetic figure.

And then it had been a strenuous day indeed. He had
reached the dock all right and got aboard, and Tommy, his
new chum, had shown him where to get the things he needed.
The cook had to be placated, an irascible man of brutally frank
utterance and having an aversion to " new-starters " generally.
But eventually Hannibal had made coffee and toast. and carried
it down into the engine-room safely. That had been an ex-
perience ! The interminable iron ladders which had to be negoti-
ated with one hand on the polished oily rail, the hot oppressive
atmosphere, the smell of oil and steam, the sound of water drop-
ping somewhere far below, the occasional hiss and spit of a
blowing steam-pipe, the shimmer of brass, the half-revealed
glory of shining steel, the purr of the little dynamo, the lazy
flutter of the forced-draught- fan — all these things smote his
senses and filled him with a sort of solemn delight. This was
indeed what he desired. This was worth while. And down
there, too, he had encountered the man whom he understood to
be his boss, the Second Engineer, a spare, wiry young man whose
hair was greying at the temples, and whose eyes had crows feet
in the corners. He came abruptly round from behind the en-
gines, his singlet stained and splotched with black oil, which can
no more be washed out than printers' ink, his greasy peaked
cap stuck on one corner of his determined-looking head, and a
cigarette in his mouth. " Ain't it 'ot 'ere ? " Hannibal had re-
marked, looking in awe at the great silent engines. And the
Second Engineer, after glancing at the thermometer, an instru-
ment of softly glowing copper, had looked at Hannibal over the
edge of the mug without speaking. He was not a man of many
words, having to deal with so many crises where words are of no
avail, and he could not express his opinion of a youth who, at
five-thirty in the morning, thought a temperature of a hundred

CASUALS OF THE SEA 825

degrees anything extraordinary. After a sup and a bite at the
toast he had set them down and disappeared again, and Hannibal
heard a clean hard burst of steam, a choking splutter and a sudden
jar as of something brought up standing, and then, as though
that something had experienced a prodigious relief, a sigh, fol-
lowed by a regular throb. How interesting it was! He turned
and watched the shining little engine that drove the dynamo,
and saw the blue fire that snapped now and again from the
brushes. This was indeed the heart of things. And then the
Second Engineer reappeared, summoned by the whir of the
telephone-bell, and he spoke in a low voice to someone above:
" She's just on the sixty-mark now, sir. . . . All right, sir. . . .
It's eased back quarter turn, sir. . . . All right, sir. Just begun
circulation. . . . Quite cold, sir. . . . L.P.'s warmin', though.
. . . Yes. . . . All right, sir." And he had hung up the re-
ceiver, and seeing Hannibal staring at the engines, had pointed
with his thumb to the ladder, a gesture of enormous expressive-
ness, and Hannibal had taken the hint.

And then had come trials and difficulties, the inevitable trials
and difficulties of those unaccustomed to the ways of ships.
He felt now that he would never have got through if it had
not been for Tommy, who told him how tilings were done.
But Tommy was out on deck pulling ropes, working the winch
(he called it " vorkin' the vinch"), running hither and thither
at the bidding of a tall strong man, the Bosun, doing an
amount of work out of all proportion to his size. Tommy
could not spare the time to go everywhere with him, and so
Hannibal had made numerous mistakes, such, for example, as
asking the Chief where the sugar was kept, and enquiring of the
cook the whereabouts of the tablecloth. He even committed the
unpardonable crime of opening the Third Mate's door (quite by
mistake, they were so alike, those doors), and inadvertently
arousing a young man who had been ejected from Frascati's at
twelve-thirty a. m. But in spite of these troubles, Hannibal
felt that he was learning, and having taken off his coat and
" started in " in earnest in the mess-room, turning out all the
" gear," he found little difficulty in getting the breakfast. And
then, when that was over, the dishes washed, the cloth shaken
and folded up, the tapestry cover spread over the table, he
had found time to pause and draw breath. After all, he had
not done so badly. The four engineers had filed in and seated

326 CASUALS OF THE SEA

themselves without comment. Hannibal had looked at them
curiously, from the taciturn Chief who ate nothing, down to
the grimy-faced Fourth who ate everything he could reach.
Only the Second carried on a low monologue which was intended
for the Chief, who replied by nods. The Third, who seemed
to suspect the Fourth of a tendency to hilarity, fixed a glassy
eye upon the new mess-room steward and made him extremely un-
comfortable. Hannibal hardly knew whether to out-stare him
or turn away. The Chief had a fashion of pointing silently for
anything he wanted, which was rather disconcerting, but it was a
glorious change from " nagging." Another thing that recon-
ciled him was the prodigious quantity of food left over. A
great dish of rump steak and onions swimming in gravy, a plate
of liver and bacon, potatoes, jam, marmalade, and coffee. Evi-
dently he would not starve. And then, when he had washed up,
it occurred to him to go through the cupboard from which such an
astonishing stench arose. He pulled out numerous tin boxes con-
taining fragments of bygone loaves of bread, a piece of cheese
rivalling the Stone Age in antiquity, a pot of jam turning rapidly
into cockroaches, some oval cabin biscuits, a pot of marmalade
turning into sugar, and various vessels which had at one time
held chutney, pickled onions, sardines, ketchup, and mustard.
The whole of this collection was alive with an army of insects
varying in size from the huge brown cockroach to the diminutive
black objects with many legs and enormous antennae, with which
they appeared to be signalling in semaphore fashion to unseen
battalions in the interstices of the fabric. Hannibal was not
quite unacquainted with these uncertificated members of the
ship's company, but he was somewhat amazed by the number of
them. There seemed to be an illimitable supply, for no slaughter
ever sufficed. So he carefully emptied the tins, swept the cheese,
the crusts, the dirt, and the empties into his dust-pan, and threw
them on the ash-heap on the bridge-deck. He had found a
dirty white jacket with silver buttons such as the cabin stewards
wore, buttons with the curious zigzag figure which appeared on
the funnel, on the house-flag at the masthead, on some of the
crockery, and on the badges which the mates and engineers wore
on their caps. It was the Greek letter K and it was what Hanni-
bal, in his ignorance, called the " Trade mark of the Firm."

But now it was evening, the toil and excitement was over for
a time, and he could think about it all in peace. He looked

CASUALS OF THE SEA 327

round his berth and felt that he would do very well there.
In the next room were two apprentices, young men about his
own age, who were now on deck with the others carrying out
the orders of the gigantic Bosun and the Chief Mate, who was
always whistling for someone to run up and down and do some-
thing that had been forgotten. Once Hannibal had caught
sight of Captain Briscoe walking to and fro on the bridge, had
seen him pull the lanyard that ran to the great bronze whistle
on the funnel and blow an ear-splitting blast. This was to
warn the ferry-boat at Woolwich. Hannibal had leaned over
the side of the boat and watched the tiny people waving on the
ferry, and the sight made him realise what he had done. He
was a seafaring man now, one of a class apart. Those people
on the ferry were Browns, tiny respectable home-staying Browns,
builders and shopkeepers. How distant they all seemed, as he
watched the ferry slide sideways to the pier!

He busied himself putting his gear straight, though he had
not brought a great deal. Tommy, the omniscient Tommy, had
advised him to buy all he wanted in Swansea, whither they were
going to load. The previous mess-room steward had been what
Tommy called " a dirty feller," but his " donkey's breakfast," the
straw mattress in a case of sacking, seemed all right, and Hanni-
bal spread his blue blanket over it and settled the pink flannel
bolster in place. Then he stowed all his clothes away in the
drawer. Tommy slept in the top bunk, and Hannibal noted how
" tidy " he kept everything belonging to him. That was Tommy's
mania, " tidiness." Hannibal was looking at the little photos on
the bulkhead when he came in with his kid of hash and a tin of
tea.

" Ullo, how's things? " he asked cheerily, and slipped off his
sea-boots, which were all wet with washing down the bridge-
deck.

"Pretty fair," smiled Hannibal. "You finished?"

"No. I go to the veel at eight bells," replied Tommy, taking
a knife and fork from a drawer, and seeing a puzzled look on
his new chum's face, he went on: " You don't know de bells, I
a'pose? It's one bell in de dog vatch now. Quarter to eight's
one bell too. Eight o'clock's eight bells, so's twelve and four.
I'll show you. Hain't you bin to sea before? "

Hannibal shook his head.

" I bin to sea two — nearly three years now."

828 CASUALS OF THE SEA

"You? 'Ow old are you, then?"

" Fifteen and a 'alf."

Hannibal looked at the round rosy face and clear sea-blue
eyes in astonishment.

" You been all round then ? " And Tommy, his mouth full of
hash, nodded.

" You ain't English, are you ? " And Tommy shook his head.

" Amsterdammer," he said. " Don't you like Dutchmen? "

" I never seen one before," Hannibal confessed. " I've been
in London all me life," and he tried to imagine how life looked
to this little seafarer who toiled so cheerfully in foreign ships
and spoke a foreign tongue so well. " D'you speak Dutch?"
he asked in wonder. Tommy nodded.

" And German and Flemish too. I vorked as mess-room on a
German ship three months," he said. " Dat was no no good.
Germans gib bad grub an' bad pay."

" What do you get here then ? "

" Three pounds, like you."

As time went on, and especially after they had gone out of
Swansea, Hannibal learned something of the life of his new
chum, Drevis Noordhof, of his childhood in Amsterdam, of how
he ran away to sea when he was thirteen, of his sufferings on
the German steamer, so that he ran away from her in Peters-
burg and, getting lost in the city, was found by an Englishman,
who put him on a British ship and sent him home again. He
learned of Tommy's " oppu," his mother's mother, who had
brought him up, for his mother was dead and he had never
known who his father had been. But the next day after they
left London, when the Caryatid was below St. Catherine's Point,
she began to roll, and Hannibal's interest in life vanished like the
morning mist.

It was in the mess-room, as he felt round among his gear
for the tea-things, that the cataclysm overtook him, and he
stumbled out on deck and over to the side in an agony of hope
that vomiting might relieve him. The cook saw him hanging,
limp and heaving, to the rail, and threw a rotten spud at him
for luck, but Hannibal was past being offended. The bitter-
ness of death, it seemed, was at hand, and each choking retch
was like to prove his last gasp. Those who can experience sea-
sickness in the comfort of the saloon know nothing of its terrors.
To be compelled to do one's daily work at the same time is a

CASUALS OF THE SEA 829

different matter. It is no jest, until it is all over. Weak and
listless, Hannibal tried to make the tea and take it round. In
the room occupied by the Third and Fourth he saw the latter
in his pyjamas on the settee, a pipe in his mouth, a couple of
pillows behind him, reading Sapho. The rolling had no effect
on him. Was it possible, thought Hannibal, that he would ever
be like that, be able to loll on a settee and smoke while the
ship lay over in this disgusting manner? The roll flung him
against the alley-way stanchion and he looked down at the grey-
blue waters of the Channel with an unutterable loathing.

As the day advanced he grew worse, and at tea-time he
thought he was really going to die. Only the callous gibes of
the others reassured him. Of course, everybody had an in-
fallible panacea for the complaint. The cook said he ought
to drink a pint of salt water every half-hour, and Hannibal
wondered if the man were mad as well as heartless. The Chief
said nothing except to order him to put the racks on the table
and leave nothing loose. The Second suggested putting a finger
down his throat to make himself sick and get it over; but Hanni-
bal, with tears in his eyes, answered that he had no difficulty in
being sick, and proved his words by rushing to the side and
casting his dinner into the sea. Then the Carpenter, a tall, hard-
featured man in enormous sea-boots that reached to his thighs,
asked him how a little fat pork would suit him, and the young
man's face turned ashen-grey with nausea. It was all very
tragic and ridiculous, and when he came reeling into the mess-
room with the potatoes falling out of the dishes, and the stew
under his arm, the juniors cackled with delight and the Chief
made grumbling remarks about the " ballast run."

It was dreadful to watch four men voraciously devouring a
big meal of stew, potatoes, pork, jam, and tea, and lighting
pipes of full-strength tobacco afterwards. It seemed inhuman,
to him, struggling with a bucket of hot water and breaking dishes
at every turn. The fragments slithered about the floor, and
when he got down on his knees to look for them, the sickness
came on and he had to rush out on deck.

The sea was not really very rough, though the Caryatid
rolled rather heavily round Land's End, but a tall ship in
ballast is at the mercy of the slightest swell, and Hannibal
thought it very tempestuous indeed. It was good for him that
be was compelled to go about regularly. If he had lain down

330 CASUALS OF THE SEA

as he wished he would have been relieved, like a passenger,
but he would have been all the longer finding his sea-legs.
The Second knew this and kept him mercilessly to his work.
Hannibal used to watch the Chief out on the after-deck walk-
ing to and fro, sloping his body as the ship rolled, his pipe
sticking out from between the upturned flaps of his pilot-coat.
The Second would come up from below and stand near the
engine-room door talking to the Chief as he walked, his cap
hanging to one corner of his head, his knotted arms all smeared
with grease, and he would look over the side now and again to
see if the bilge-pumps were working right.

They were in the Bristol Channel, coming up past Lundy,
when Hannibal felt able to sit down and light a cigarette again.
He still had a queer subdued feeling of disquietude, but the
sickness was gone, and he had lost the horrible sensation of his
stomach being loose inside him. The natural optimism of youth,
aided by Tommy's cheerful conversation, took Hannibal's
thoughts away from himself and he began to observe once
more. He revelled in the immensity of sea and sky, the huge
piles of tinted clouds driving before the south-westerly wind,
billow on billow of cumulous vapour, through which the straight
slanting rays of an invisible sun poured through like the celestial
glory in Italian paintings. He liked the ceaseless onslaught of
the waves against the bows, and he would watch breathlessly as
the ship rose and fell, to see her plunge just as a swell advanced,
and see the sheet of spray flash across the water. And the per-
petually-recurring attacks of the defeated waves as they licked
the sides of the ship away below, rushing along the plates, run-
ning up strake after strake and vanishing with a vindictive slap
— this was a source of continual delight to him.

Tommy came down from his two-hour trick at the " veel "
and told him they would be in Mumble's Roads before dawn,
and then of course he had to explain what he meant by Roads,
which was an anchorage. Hannibal asked him what sort of
a place Swansea was, and Tommy proclaimed it " all right, all
right."

" I got a girl there ! " he informed Hannibal, who laughed.

"You!"

"Ah. You want a girl? Dere's mine, see? " and he showed
Hannibal a picture-postcard with a photo of a dark young lady
with one hand on a carved table and a panorama of tropical

CASUALS OF THE SEA 331

jungle and river scenery behind her. " She's got a sister. You
come wid me, I'll show you."

" You got one in every port? " asked Hannibal facetiously.

Tommy smiled as he stripped off to have a scrub.

" Girl's all right, I reckon," he opined, stretching, and rum-
pling his tow-coloured hair. " This one here I like good an'
plenty." And he plunged his arms into the basin and began to
wash. His round little face came out dripping suds and he
reached blindly for his towel.

" Some of them are no dam good," he remarked, towelling
vigorously. " One I had in Liverpool, over at Bootle, when the
ship was laid up, she said she'd write to me. She didn't at all,
and when I came back she'd got anoder feller. I 'ad one in
Glasgow too, and she did de same. See? Dat de worst o' bein'
a sailor-boy. Ven you're away, she get's anoder feller."

"D'you go out with 'em?" asked Hannibal, lying back lux-
uriously on the settee.

u Sure ! Vat else ? See ? You get dis oder girl, de sister,
and we'll go out to de Empire, eh ? ,

" I'd'now," he replied. " I've 'ad enough of 'em."

" What you been doin* ashore ? " Tommy asked, dragging a
comb through his hair.

" In a shop, a tobacconist's," replied Hannibal, blowing rings.

" Gee-whiz ! Dat 'ud be all right ! Why the 'ell d'you come
to sea, den."

" I wanted to 'ave a look around."

" It's no good, dis sort o' life, I reckon," said Tommy, slipping
his head through a singlet and straightening up. " People ashore
get plenty more money 'n us."

" Not all found," argued Hannibal, who was beginning to see
things.

" Better grub, though."

" This 'ere grub's all right. More'n I can eat."

" You vait till we get to sea. Dis 'ere's coastin'. Vait till de
salt meat start and de tinned stuff. One trip we went from
Shiminoseki to Honolulu. No peas, no spuds, noding but tinned
stuff. You vait!"

And Tommy climbed into his bunk to have his eight-to-
twelve sleep. Hannibal went out on deck to have a think. He
could not quite understand how Tommy should take things so
gaily. And yet, when he got ashore in that strange place whose

332 CASUALS OF THE SEA

lights would soon be twinkling ahead, would he not feel more
free himself? Would not the romance of youth surge in him
and tempt him to see the light in women's eyes? He was away
now. He was, in the eyes of the Brown family, a scapegrace,
a defaulter, a youthful prodigal. He would have to live up to
the character. His eyes danced as he thought of the possibili-
ties before him. Even now, the voyage scarcely begun, he had
nearly half a month's pay in hand, — twenty-seven shillings.
Of course, he would have to lay in a sea-stock in Swansea, as
Tommy had told him; but even then he would have some money
to " blow." He stood with the wind ruffling his hair, watching
the light on Lundy Island dying away behind them. The tide
was on the turn now, and the quick thud-thud of the engines
came up to him more faintly now that they were in slack water.
Up on the bridge dark forms flitted to and fro, and every now
and then the Mate's whistle shrilled through the night air and a
sailor would hurry aft with a lantern to look at the patent log.

It was four-thirty in the morning when the cook dug him
in the ribs and he rolled out on the floor, rubbing his eyes.
The electric bulb glowed in the ceiling, a towel wrapped round it
to screen the light from penetrating Tommy's curtains, where he
lay in the profound slumber of those who keep the middle-
watch. Hannibal scrambled into his clothes and hurried out
on the deck. They were going in. Just ahead he could see
the deep red light that marked the entrance to the lock-channel.
Rubbing his eyes, he took his coffee-pot to the galley. The
junior apprentice, a freckled young man with a jaw that receded
into his thick woollen comforter, was standing in the galley,
talking to the cook.

" Is that a fact? " asked the cook, as Hannibal lifted the dipper
from the hook.

" The Third Mate swears blind it is," said the apprentice.
" I heard him tellin' Mr. Brail. Saw the old man comin' out of
Frascati's with her last night before we come away. So he
followed and ran against him accident'ly for the purpose. You
know Mr. Cadoxton."

" He's certainly got the gall," assented the cook, searching
among his utensils.

" Well, he apologised and all that, and the Old Man, who
scarcely knows Cadoxton yet by sight, seeing he only joined him-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 333

self last week, ups and introduces him. I reckon the Old Man
was a bit on, you know."

" Frascati's ! " said the cook, throwing up his eyes to heaven
as though he had been a sad dog there in the past.

" Well, the Old Man ups and introduces him — ' Mister — er,'
and Cadoxton prompts him a bit — ' Mister Cadoxton, my future
wife.' And the Third Mate says chin-chin, and shakes hands
with her. A peach, the Third Mate says."

" And she's comin' the trip ? " asked the cook, passing out
a great schooner of coffee to a fireman.

" So the Third Mate says. He says the Old Man told 'em
at the Cabin Table he was goin' up to London on business, and
the Mate said something about the Old Man tellin* him he wouldn't
be back for several days. I shouldn't wonder."

" I don't like women on the ship," growled the cook. " It's
all sorts of extry work for the Steward, and that means more
for me too."

"Well," remarked the junior apprentice, "there it is. The
Mate knows more than he lets on. We shall see to-day, very
likely."

Hannibal went out and made the coffee. The Chief was
passing up and down in his thick pilot-coat, and said to him as
he passed:

" Make coffee for all, boy. They're down below."

He went back and toasted four big slices of bread as he had
been told by the Second. This time he saw the senior apprentice
standing by the galley door, talking furtively to those within.

" I was talk in' to Mr. Cadoxton just now when I left the
wheel," he said, " and he told me he could swear blind he's
seen her or her picture somewhere. He's tr)'in' to think. He's
goin' to turn over his letters. Anyhow, he's sure it's some time
since she left the infant school."

" He's no chicken, the Old Man," remarked the junior ap-
prentice.

" He's all right. Don't come interferin' with the work on
deck. Yes, sir! " he howled, and darted away to where the Sec-
ond Mate, a rotund little man in uniform, was standing by some
ropes.

" Tod always thinks he gets exclusive information out of the
Third Mate," said the junior apprentice in some indignation.

334 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" He's next 'im," said the cook significantly.

" Not in this case. I heard the Mate say myself, ' Mr. Cadox-
ton, you're making a mistake. Better not let on you've seen her
before if the Old Man brings her down.' "

'* Oh, 'e said that, did 'e," said the cook, chopping onions.
" 'E knows somethin' then."

" His brother-in-law's Second Mate o' the Torso, this Old
Man's last command, and I'll bet my rubber boots he knows
something. His brother-in-law lives near the Old Man's peo-
ple."

Hannibal ran out with his toast, buttered it, and took it down
the engine-room ladders to the starting-platform. The tele-
graph clanged deep and resonant as he reached the plates, and
he saw the Second throw the engines into gear with a lightning
twist of his hand. The Fourth was standing by the handle
of the great enamelled dial where the peremptory finger was
pointing to " Slow Ahead." The Third strolled to and fro on
the middle grating, feeling here and there, a cigarette hanging
to his lower lip, and a spanner in his hand. Suddenly, just as
Hannibal set down the steaming cups on the vice-bench, the
gong went again, this time with a shrill poignant clangour that
drove the blood back to one's heart. The pointer had swung
round to " Full Astern." With a turn of his hand the Second
sent the reversing engine flying round, the huge links of the
main valve-gear slid over to position, the cranks paused, trem-
bled, and then sprang to their work as though whipped into
activity by some invisible titanic hand. With infinite aplomb
the Third leaned over the shining hand-rails feeling the plung-
ing masses of metal as they flew up and down; the Second eyed
the gauges and beckoned to the Fourth. Hannibal stepped up to
him as lie began to speak.

" Coffee, sir? " said he above the rush and thud of the engines.

"All right. What was that about the Old Man. Goin' to
get married?" said the Second, addressing the Fourth and
spitting into the high-pressure crank-pit.

" The Third Mate's got a yarn about meetin' him in Fras-
cati's the other night," said the Fourth, opening a drain-cock
to ease the water hammer in the low-pressure cylinder. " Tony
lot, they mates! As a matter of fact, I was in the cabin this
afternoon askin' the Old Man about my half-pay note, and he
was writin' the address on a letter."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 335

" An' you saw it ? "

" Ay ! Miss Gooderich. He writes plain enough, you ken.
I didn' Iiave time to spot the address. S. \Vr. anyway. That's
London, is it not?" he addressed Hannibal, who was standing
witli a curious look of amazement on his face.

" Ah," he assented with a nod. " Sou'-wcst that is."

" And he put sealin' wax on the back," added the Fourth,
reaching up and handing the Third an oil-feeder. " Shall a
book it ? " he asked, breaking off, and when the Second nodded
he wrote on the log board. " And then he pushed his ring on
it and stamped it. It was her all right, all right."

"An* Cadoxton don't know you know it?"

*' Xa. He knows it all, does Cadoxton, him and his Fras-
cati's ! What's a sailor-man doin' to Frascati's, anyway?
Gatti's was always good enough for me when I was in t* Castle
Line."

" His ma has means," sniffed the Second, eyeing the tele-
graph. "Surely we're backing into Port Talbot?"

' 'Tis to swing her," said the Fourth. " She's like a brewer's
lorry to swing. Full ahead, she is ! " he shouted as the deep
mellow ahead gong gave out its warning note, and answered.

" He'll be takin' her the trip," vociferated the Second, as
a fireman entered and signalled expressively for the fan to go
faster. The Second nodded.

" Maybe! Easy ! Slow ahead," chanted the Fourth, writing
on the log board. " She'll be waitin* of us in the Prince o'
Wales Dock."

" Mess ! " called the Second to Hannibal, who was still stand-
ing trying to get the hang of this tremendous affair. " Do you
go up and ask the Chief to speak down, will you? Savvy?"

Hannibal roused and nodded.

" Yes, sir," and he climbed up toward the dawn.

When he had told the Chief, who ran to his telephone and
spoke to the Second, the Caryatid was safely through the dock
gates and she was being swung round to move up to her berth
under the coal-tips, huge latticed structures with pale lights on
their upper cabins, their shoots drawn up and pointing to the
delicate blue sky, stark emblems of utility deriding the azure.
All around were sleeping steamers, their galley lights winking
in the twilight, the huddled figures of night-watchmen leaning
over their bulwarks, observing the new-comer with the insatiable

336 CASUALS OF THE SEA

curiosity of the sea. A small boat, loaded with a hawser and
propelled by a stern-oar, waggled to tiie dock wall and made
fast. The Caryatid's forecastle-head vibrated with the working
of the windlass. With ceaseless industry the sailors ran to and
fro on the decks. At intervals the hum was torn by a short
blast from the whistle or the far-off chaffering of megaphones.
Slowly, slowly the tall hull drew in to her appointed berth
beneath the silent tip. The telegraph orders grew less fre-
quent. With a thuttering roar the safety valves lifted and a
billow of white steam flew from the 'opper waste-pipe on the
funnel. Now and again Hannibal saw the Old Man waving to
the Second Mate on the poop, saw the Third Mate at the Old
Man's elbow discussing something. Men appeared on the quay,
men in blue uniforms, men in black coal-grimed apparel, men in
new serge suits. The red disc of the sun rose up above the
hills and flooded the port with the light of a May morning.
Birds sang under the eaves of the weighing-houses and flew
across the railway sidings, and sea-gulls, gossiping on the buoys
or perched in solitary grandeur on the trucks of the sailing ships,
viewed with easy familiarity the advent of the Caryatid. At
length the stern ropes were made fast, the blue-uniformed man
on the quay cocked his eye to the bridge, calculating the chances
of coomshaw from the skipper, the gangway, urged by twenty
willing hands, slid over the bulwarks and down to the black
earth, the drum of alien heels sounded on her decks, and the
bridge, so authoritative, so omnipotently urgent a moment since,
was silent. She was no longer a sentient thing in the sea, she
was become but a line in the shipping news, a factor on the Ex-
change. There she had not even a name, she was simply a semi-
hypothetical capacity, " 8000 tons, Las Palmas, 8s. 3d.," a bucket
in the endless distribution chain that creeps across the world.
Hannibal, busily laying the table for breakfast, wondered
after all why he should feel so excited over the news that
had come to his ears. He had already enough of the sea-habit
to be pretty sure that any amount of relationship made but
small mark on the hard and shining discipline of the sea. And
he was not unmindful, moreover, of' Mr. Grober's valediction,
to be master of himself. Poor old Mr. Grober! Hannibal was
sorry now he had not looked in and taken that book back. He
thought of him now, feebly setting out his boxes of rubbishy
books, standing by his door looking out with rheumy eyes upon

CASUALS OF THE SEA 337

a world which, he said, was not an oyster to be opened but a
quicksand to be passed. Surely enough he had no wings, or they
had been pulled out long ago. He would sit in his dusty shop,
his pipe in his mouth, his spectacles on his nose, slowly reading
a dead book, slowly sinking into the sand. . . .

That was not to be his way, Hannibal thought fiercely, clatter-
ing the cups and saucers. No fear! He was not going to be
" sucked in," as Mr. Grober had phrased it. As for this astonish-
ing information which had come to him so fortuitously, he was
going to be his own boss and earn his living independent, of
anybody. He knew now, though, why Minnie had said " Be
a good boy on the Caryatid.'* She knew this! But what did it
matter? The Old Man was the Old Man certainly, but he had
no truck with the engineers' department. Hannibal, going over
the matter in the cool light of morning, decided that his freedom

of soul was unimpaired. If it had been the Browns, now !

But that was grotesque in its impossibility. As lie carried the
porridge in from the galley he laughed in sheer light-hearted
conviction that he had nothing more to fear from the Browns,
lie would do his day's work and go ashore, oblivious of Minnies
and Skippers and Amelias, go with Master Drevis Noordhoff*
and investigate, in impartial spirit, the world, the flesh, and the
devil. He Mould have no more shilly-shally, this piddling game
of hanging like a puppy to its mother's dugs. He would go out
and see for himself. Was he not a man, a seaman in the British
Mercantile Marine, with a number and registered rating? Had
he not come into direct conflict with organised government,
looking a supercilious shipping-clerk in the eye and taking a
neatly-stamped advance-note from the hand of the gilded creature
who wrote them out on that polished mahogany counter? Had
he not gone down into the depths and prayed for dissolution in
the agony of sea-sickness? What were the petty details of
domestic life to him, lord of himself and a twelve by fourteen
mess-room? He was almost hilarious when he hastened round
to call the engineers to breakfast.

"What's the matter? Somebody died an' left you a farm?"
asked the Second, mildly surprised at Hannibal's genial face.

"Wife got twins?" enquired the Fourth, looking between his
legs as he washed in a bucket in the alley-way.

Hannibal laughed.

"There's nobody dead!" he laughed; and the Third, fixing

338 CASUALS OF THE SEA

him with a glassy stare, a stare that concealed a violently roman-
tic soul, remarked, " He must be in love."

" He wouldn't grin if he was in love," said the Second, hunt-
ing for a clean shirt. " I was in love once, and it was rotten.
Ever been in love, Tich? "

" I'm goin' to get a grip of her waist to-night," said the
Third. "Spink!" he addressed the stooping Fourth. "It's
your night aboard, me bonny laddie, d'ye ken that?"

" Don't you be so free wi' your nights aboard," growled the
Fourth. " I'm goin' to ask the Chief for an exemption, it bein'
a home port."

"You in love, too?" enquired the Second, locking the door.
" Boys will be boys ! Don't keep the Chief waiting for his grub."

At breakfast the main theme of conversation, the theme which
was vibrating in every department of the ship, from the Chief
Mate's berth to the lazarette where the cook was cutting up
joints, overrode the minor topics of the casual loves of the sea.
Even the dour Chief, nibbling his toast and sipping his tea, for
he was a victim of dyspepsia brought on by early carousing, made
sundry disjointed references to the rumours afloat. Mr. Spink,
devastating a trencher of steak and onions, contributed his own
precious tid-bit to the news, a tid-bit undeniably confirming the
general impression. Hannibal listened, but forbore to speak.
The knowledge that he might give their curiosity a perfectly
unendurable fillip amused him, but he felt quite unable to cope
with the ensuing situation, and so refrained.

" Mate's got an idea's somethin' fishy in it," the Chief mur-
mured, looking into his tea with profound distrust.

" Cabin talk, a reckon," said the Second with his mouth full.
" Cadoxton had his foot on the rail in London and he wants us
to know it. D'you reckon she'll be comin' the trip then, sir?"

The Chief looked round as though lost in an uncongenial maze
of psychological problems. And in truth lie was in no wise
competent to grapple with either drama or romance.

" I could'na say," he murmured softly, pointing to the butter,
and Hannibal moved it towards him nastily. " Better let the
Fourth put a new rubber in the deck reducin' valve, eh? I
heard it pop this morning."

The Second cast a sidelong look of surprise at the Chief,
who was always surprising him by unexpected knowledge.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 339

" Aye," he said, digging at the butter. " I'll let him all right,
all right."

" An' the Third can help him," droned the Chief discon-
tentedly. " I'd like you to go through the bunkers this mornin'."

The Third fixed his eye on the cruet and tried to ignore the
exquisite agony of the kicks of the joyful Spink.

"Is Mrs. Hopkins comin' down this time?" enquired the
Second, waiving the bunkers as an unsuitable subject for the
table. The Chief nodded and passed his cup to Hannibal.

" So a believe," he returned.

" I should a thought you'd a fetched her to London."

" Too far. Didn't care to ask the Old Man. Bachelor skip-
pers don't carry women round the coast."

" The Mate says his brother-in-law's Mate o' the Torso, where
this Old Man was," began the Fourth, who had been talking to
the senior apprentice before breakfast.

" Ay, so I heard," commented the Chief coldly, and so shut
him up.

" That's a fact, sir," urged the Second, unabashed by the
Fourth's discomfiture. " They both belong to Shields, you see,
and from the yarn, this Old Man has no particular objections
to women on the ship. Anyway, he's goin' to do himself in
now."

The Chief stirred his second cup of tea sombrely.

" Forget it! " he muttered. " You'll get caught some day."

And Mr. Spink, spreading marmalade with a liberality that
would have given the owners cold shivers, giggled.

XII

FRER of the numbing paralysis of Billiter Lane and
Jubilee Street, free of the day's work on the ship, Han-
nibal selected a clean collar, brushed his clothes,
lighted a cigarette, and accompanied Master Drevis
Noordhoff, ordinary seaman and cheerful optimist, ashore. They
wound their way along the dock side, debouched upon the Port
Tennant Road, crossed the North Dock, and passing under the
railway arch ascended Wind Street, Tommy lightening the way
with chatter of his many experiences in distant lands. Hannibal
listened abstractedly, his eyes wandering up and down, taking
in the novel details of foreign aspect. At the top in Castle
Square a crowd were gathered about a young lady who was sing-
ing a hymn.

" Sally's Army ! " remarked Hannibal, sniffing.

" No good to me," said Tommy, brushing past.

" Where will you go when you die ? " asked Hannibal, shocked
that one so young should be irreligious.

" In a box," replied the boy promptly, and Hannibal's smile
died away. He thought of the Little Brown Box from which
he had escaped, and shuddered.

" That ain't the end," he protested uneasily.

"You can search me then!" said Tommy joyously, and led
the way along Castle Street, which was narrow and populous in
those days, a congested artery leading to the freer air of High
Street and beyond. Suddenly the boy turned into a sweet-shop
and rolled sailorwise up to the counter. A fluffy, dark-haired
vision rose up and simpered.

It was an edifying spectacle. All the worthy gentlemen, from
Cobbett and Ruskin onwards, who have prescribed early matri-
mony, would have purred with delight had they seen that en-
counter among the candy. Hannibal watched them from the
entrance. He was meditating flight. But Tommy, with a grin
of delight, turned and beckoned vigorously, and Hannibal came
unwillingly to the front.

" Dis is my gel," he whispered. " Friend o' mine," he told

340

CASUALS OF THE SEA 341

the fluffy young lady, who laid her head on one side and held
out her hand. She must have been at least fourteen.

M Where's de sister, Girtie. My friend 'e wants a gel, too."

Hannibal tried to protest, but he was too weak. Girtie smiled
gloriously into his eyes and laid her head on the other side.

" She's goin' to the station to see a friend of hers. She's
coming from Cardiff about a job."

"What time train?" asked the pertinacious Amsterdammer.

Girtie looked down at the oxidised watch that hung on her
blouse.

" Seven-forty."

" We'll go and see her, eh? Then I come back for you. You
finish nine o'clock? You get my post card? "

Girtie nodded. She had a drawer full of post cards from
every conceivable port of the world. Wherever the Merchant
Service had penetrated, throughout the Seven Seas, from the
ports of the Danube and the fever-ravaged reaches of the
Amazon, came picture post cards to Girtie. But she did not
tell Tommy this. Girtie's success as a sailor's sweetheart rested
in part upon her ability to make each guileless youth imagine
himself the one chosen Jason of the Argosies. It is not an
easily classified virtue, this innocent beguilement of the idle hours
of wandering souls, but it implies a certain talent in the charmer.
Very few can do it successfully year after year. Miss Bevan,
that amazing genius of Barry Dock, raised it to a fine art.
When she withdrew into the comparative retirement of matri-
mony, the gaiety of the nations was eclipsed, she became a legend,
and it is whispered that her post cards, in five hundred albums,
are to be presented to Lloyds. Girtie in the confectioner's shop
in the old Castle Street was but an humble follower of the greater
light. She dealt, after the manner of her age. chiefly with ap-
prentices, junior officers, and Tommy. He, at least, had that
distinction. His artless audacity had led him to ask her how
«he would like him in the family. She had replied at first that
" she couldn't be dead," the Welsh girl's potent phrase. But
Tommy was a good spender. The silver for which he toiled so
hard on the Caryatid passed through his fingers like water when
he was with Girtie. And Girtie smiled. Even Third Mates
didn't run to eighteenpenny stalls at the Empire, and beribboned
boxes of chocolates. Those who didn't bother to take her out,
Anyway. Life to Girtie was a string on which boys were strung

342 CASUALS OF THE SEA

like beads. Some of them were blue, some red, some white. As
yet there were none of Gold. Tommy came sliding through her
hands at the bidding of the freight market which had wafted
the Caryatid to Swansea, and being a maid of modest imagina-
tion she was content. And moreover, this solicitude to provide
her sister with a boy was kind. Girtie felt deeply that it was
not easy to attach Lilian to any one. Lilian was not a peach,
she was not a genius, and she had bad teeth. Obviously it was
Girtie's duty to do her best for Lilian. And when Tommy pro-
duced a well-grown young man with the full liquid brown eye,
so dear to women, she smiled.

" Yes, of course," she replied. " I suppose you've had a gay
time in London whatever. You off the ships ? " she asked Han-
nibal, who nodded and cleared his throat.

" It's nearly half-past seven now," he said to Tommy, who
was stealing chocolates.

" Come on then? Chin-chin, Girtie," he called. " Back in a
jiffy."

" She's all right, eh ? " he asked Hannibal, chewing.

"Is her sister older?" Hannibal wanted to know. He did
not care for very young creatures. He was afraid of their
eyes.

M Yes, a good bit. She's all right though," he added, for
after all, if a girl was eighteen she couldn't help it. The tone
in which Tommy uttered his encomium, however, did not express
any desire to deprive Hannibal of Lilian's charms. There are
few things in nature more terrible to the middle-aged than the
contempt which films the gaze of boys and girls when they notice
some stiffness of ligature, some flaw in perception, some lack of
interest in life. Tommy, in the clear healthiness of body and soul
which was his sole heritage, was condescendingly cruel towards
Lilian, whose complexion, compared with his, was as a used
blotter to plate-finished Japanese paper. " She don't work in a
shop, she lives at 'ome," he remarked. " Looks after de 'ouse.
And Girtie say, she goes to de mission too. Tryin' to get a feller,
I s'pect."

Even Hannibal was not entranced by this information.

'* She's respectable, then ? " he surmised.

" Sure thing. Here's de station, right ahead."

They crossed the road and entered the subdued melancholy
that seems to be inseparable from a small terminus. A train

CASUALS OF THE SEA 313

appeared as they gained the platform, a creaking deliberate in-
terminable local affair; from whose opening doors leaped some
dozens of impatient passengers. Far up the platform the two
youths saw a young woman in a large straw hat scanning the
compartments.

" Der she is," said Tommy, pointing and beginning to hurry,
but Hannibal was staring into the window nearest to him. A
plump young woman was trying to open the door. He stepped
forward and twisted the handle, and she desisted, smiling joy-
ously.

" Much obliged/' she said, jumping out. "I never can man-
age the bally things." She shook herself and looked round
shrewdly. " I'm expecting a friend o' mine," she confided, " but,
as usual, she's not here. Oh, there she is ! "

" We come up to meet 'er," said Hannibal, gazing at the young
woman admiringly. " Is 'er name Lilian? "

" Just fancy ! What a coincidence ! I haven't had the pleas-
ure, have I? I meet so many gentlemen in my business."

" No," said Hannibal, warming to his work. " Matter of fact,
I don't know your friend either. My friend there, 'e's goin' to
interduce me. 'Er sister Girtie said she was up 'ere."

"Oh, I see! My name's Ffitt, Eleonora Ffitt, and I don't
care who knows it. Welsh, and I don't care who knows that
either. What a life! How are you, Lilian, darling?" They
kissed vehemently, and Hannibal lost all desire to win the affec-
tions of Lilian. He regarded Miss Ffitt with the frank pleasure
so difficult to recapture in later years.

" I was tryin' to get the door open when your friend — I
didn't catch your name — oil, yes, Gooderich, when Mr. Goode-
rich did the honours. How funny! Like a novel, isn't it?
Well, Lilian, and how's the flat-iron? You look as if you hadn't
been out for a month. Isn't it just a peach of an evening?"
She turned beaming to Hannibal, " I wish I was young again
and able to enjoy it. The older we get the harder we have to
work. Ah, well, p'raps it keeps us out of mischief. You two
off the ships? I thought so. How do I know? Ah, that's
telling. Get behind a bar and you can give a lady fortune-teller
all the points and beat her. Your friend's on deck, isn't he?
There you are again. How do I know it, indeed ! "

So she ran on, this incomparable young woman, this queen
of all whom Hannibal l»ad ever met. He was entranced. This

344 CASUALS OF THE SEA

was seeing life indeed, to listen to Miss Ffitt's ceaseless stream
of kaleidoscopic prattle. If it be true that each one of us has
in him or her some faint trace of the artist temperament, with
but an infinitesimal gift of expressing it, then I may say that
Miss Ffitt expressed herself in prattle. She was an artist in
prattle. Her mastery of the lights and shades of conversation
was astounding. She could stipple away at some imaginary
portrait of herself until it was a mere mass of dots without i's,
and yet you understood what she meant perfectly. She could
work with the etching needle or in dry-point, and if another
customer called her away she would finish the sketch hastily in
mezzotint and leave you marvelling afresh at her versatility.
Even after marriage, which inevitably slackens the speed of such
vivacious persons as Miss Ffitt, she still maintained an aston-
ishing power of prattling. Hannibal as he listened thought he
would never tire of it, and as a matter of fact, he never did.

It was not very far from the station to Castle Street, but it
was sufficient for Miss Ffitt to detail her life-history down to
the present moment, and the account included a succinct rela-
tion of the cause of her coming to Swansea, not, she intimated,
for her health, for she found Swansea relaxing, and Cardiff,
though you might call it dirty, doubtful, and even disgusting in
certain phases, was at any rate alive, which was more than you
could say for dear old Abertawe in the rain. Her comfortably
pink face glowed with satisfaction as she explained that a certain
licensed victualler needed a barmaid and was prepared to make
her a most advantageous offer. This person, Snickery by name,
was opening a temperance-house next door to his present hostelry,
and being unable to hold the license and the new establishment as
well, wished to strike a bargain with Miss Ffitt concerning the
joint management.

" He thinks," she observed, pausing to scan the latest family
groups in a photographer's window, " that I'm going to run his
jam-roll shop for him, I do believe. He thinks I'm going to
wash the floors and let him deduct a halfpenny for every saucer
we break. And I'm going to tell him," she turned to Hannibal
like a burst of sunshine, ** I'm going to tell him I can't be dead,
and no more at present from yours truly. Just look at that
girl's hat, Lilian. It's like the sky-sign of a chamber of hor-
rors."

Lilian, fearful of further criticism nearer home, for Miss Ffitt

CASUALS OF THE SEA 345

was as frank as she was good-natured, enquired what house she
referred to as kept by Mr. Snickery.

" The ' Stormy Petrel/ Ryder Street, down here and turn to
the left," Miss Ffitt replied promptly. " I must hurry, for I
must get the nine-fifteen or my character is gone for ever.

Aren't you coming? Well, good-bye, Mr. 1 didn't catch

your name — that's it, Noordhoff — Irish, isn't it? — Give my
love to Girtie."

" I'll go with you, if you don't mind," said Hannibal, getting
pleasantly red in the cheeks.

" Not at all a pleasure, I assure you. Good-bye, Lilian; take
care of the little boy." She smiled ravishingly. " I'll look in
before I go back, of course."

Lilian, looking over her shoulder with a serious look on her
disdainfully plain face, nodded, and Tommy, who was familiar
with that elusive psychological phenomenon which we call
" fancy," waved his hand encouragingly to Hannibal.

"Isn't he a cherub?" asked Miss Ffitt delightedly. "He
ought to be in a creche instead of walking out with that brazen
Girtie."

" 'F's been all over the world and 'e speaks four languages,"
replied Hannibal, pushing Miss Ffitt deferentially out of the
way of a cyclist as they crossed over. " Nice little chap, if 'e
is a forriner."

" And so are you," she informed him. " Here. Don't you
know you're a foreigner in Wales? Englishmen take the Hot
Cross Bun ! "

" Easy," protested Hannibal. " We're all under the same flag,
ain't we? "

" Of course, I was only joking. Anyhow, you're from Lon-
don, aren't you? I thought so. We often have them in Cardiff,
only they call it Cawdiff."

" Ever been there? " he asked, reluctant to see her wit spray-
ing over his native place.

" Not once. I was in Liverpool two years ago. That was
enough. Wild Wales for me all the time."

" I like to go about and sec places," he returned.

" And quite right too. That's man's work. Do a lot of these
boys good to be chased out to see the Empire. But men must
work and women must sweep., while the private bar is moaning.
Here we are. The ' Stormy Petrel.' Doesn't it look the part?

346 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Go in and have a drink for the good of the house while I talk
to Mister Snickery. I shan't be more than a minute."

Her neatly-shod feet tripped up the three steps of a private
doorway beside a quiet-looking tavern in a quiet bye street,
and Hannibal, with mingled feelings of pleasure and astonish-
ment, pushed open a glazed door marked Private Bar. Several
young men in large caps and refulgent neck-wear leaned over
the bar to catch the fairy accents of a young lady in pink who
raised her eyes and looked at Hannibal as though he had in-
sulted her. Meekly asking for a glass of Scotch, he took a match
and lit a cigarette. Slowly the habitues examined him, and he
felt uncomfortably warm under their gaze. A touch of Minnie's
aggressiveness under fire came to him.

"Lost anything?" he enquired, projecting his jaw towards
his silent critics. After all, he reflected, they couldn't do much
to him. London wasn't going to be done in by a lot of Welsh
nuts. Somewhat taken aback, they turned once more to their
little glasses of beer and left him in peace. Perhaps the whisky
inspired their respect even more than his belligerent attitude.
Neither their heads nor their means were yet up to the spirit
mark. Hannibal diluted it to a genteel half and half and drank
it down as quickly as he could. He did not want to keep Miss
Ffitt waiting a single moment. Avoiding the barmaid's resentful
gaze he went out again, his chin in the air, and walked up and
down building blissful castles in the air, of which Miss Ffitt was
the plump presiding goddess. He was quite unable to explain to
himself why she should seem so alluring to him, and fortunately
for himself he felt under no necessity to seek for such an expla-
nation. Perhaps his sea-sickness had caused him to throw over-
board the callow reluctances of early immaturity. His opening
of that railway carriage-door was not youthful impudence, but
genuine gallantry, perhaps the first conscious act of its kind in
his life. I am inclined to think, however, with my foolish par-
tiality for the lady, that Miss Ffitt, being a law to herself,
revolving in a hilarious orbit amenable to no definition, swept
him off his feet by the sheer buoyancy of her personality. She
kept his fresh resilient mind on the bounce, whereas Amelia was
continually allowing him to come to rest and then expecting
him to leap of his own volition. As he walked up and down
he laughed continually to himself. Wasn't she just a wonder?
He did hope she was coming to Swansea right off. With a

CASUALS OF THE SEA 347

pang he remembered a rumour in the mess-room that the Caryatid
would not be more than ten days in port, if that. Surely this
most opportune meeting would lead to something more than a
hasty farewell at the nine-fifteen? As though to chase away
this sinister contingency, Miss Ffitt came down the steps with a
run and a jump and beamed upon him.

" Sorry to keep you waiting," she chirped, shaking her shoulders
in a way she had, very much like a canary as he prepares to
sing. " Here we are again. That's over, thank goodness !
Yes, it's all right. I'm starting the day after to-morrow, and
next week we'll see what we shall see. Nice old man, Snickery.
What do you think? He says he's changed his mind, a thing a
man has never done before. Changed it for the better too. He's
going to run his temperance place himself — see it with the
whitewash on the windows? — And I'm going to take charge of
the ' Stormy Petrel.' What sort of angel has he got in that
bar?"

" 'Aughty blighter," said Hannibal, resentfully. " Looked as
if she wanted to bite me."

" Poor little lamb ! Did ums ! Now, aren't some girls
idiots? She'll wonder why she gets the office. There's a girl
in my place in Cardiff, just the same. I know them. Any
one 'ud think a man came into a licensed house just to get a
drink with a scowl at the back of it. And a smile is just as
cheap."

" She 'ad some fellers in there," Hannibal began loftily.

" Wrorth about three half-bitters a night each. I know them
too. And she thinks she's got the good of the house at heart
when she lets them play the goat all the evening."

" You goin' round to the other place now? "

" Just to see Girtie dear and her mother. You see, this is
my native. I was born at Crwmbrla, and if you can pronounce
it I'll give you a threepenny-bit to put on the plate on Sunday!
Girtie was a little thing when I was at school. I'd love to go
for a ride round to the Mumbles this evening. You ought to go
out there."

" With you," he ventured.

"It 'ud be a pleasure," she answered winningly. " I suppose
you'll be sailing away on the briny ocean though. Crossing the
bar, so to speak."

" Not before Sunday," he assured her.

348 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Lovely. And is that dear little boy with the rosy cheeks on
your ship ? "

" We share a room/' said Hannibal, laughing.

" Well, I do hope you tuck him up at night. Only suppose
he caught cold."

" 'E can look after 'imself all right, all right," said Hannibal.
" Didn't I tell you he speaks four languages and 'e's been at sea
nearly three years? 'E's 'andy too. Showed me my job when
I started."

" I don't know what the world's coming to. It's cradle-
robbing. All the same, I'd rather see boys go out like that
than have them messing about at home. A boy's best friend
is his mother when she boots him out to look after himself."

" That's right," agreed Hannibal. " To see the world."

" And the Empire," added Miss Ffitt, who had a weakness
for the Empire, and spoke of it as if it were the next station
beyond the World.

" Ah ! " said Hannibal, and they turned into the sweet-shop
in Castle Street.

" Hullo, Girtie ! Mother in ? How's business ? Now don't
you tell this little boy any of your saucy stories, you young
thing. I'll just run in and say chin-chin." And Miss Ffitt ran
round and disappeared behind the counter.

Tommy appeared to be getting on famously, his cheeks full
of sweets and gaiety in his eye. Lilian had disappeared. It
was probably only a variation of Lilian's usual bad luck, to lose
a swain. Girtie put the slightest touch of distance into her
reception of Hannibal when he came up to the counter.

" Where been? " asked Tommy.

" Having a drink and waiting for Miss Ffitt ? " replied Hanni-
bal.

" You goin' wid her," whispered Tommy, and Hannibal nodded,
looking at his boots.

" We're goin' to de Empire."

" All right. I'll see you to-morrow."

Hannibal had an inspiration.

" Give me quarter of a pound of chocolates," he said to Girtie,
who smiled upon him again and executed the order, putting a
redundant chocolate into her own small red mouth.

" 'Ave another," suggested Hannibal, putting down sixpence.
" 'Ave one, Tommy ? "

CASUALS OF THE SEA S49

Every bone in Tommy's head was working already, but he
made room for a lump of chocolate ginger the size of a walnut.

" No," said Hannibal, in answer to Tommy's gesture, " I
don't care for 'em. I'm smokin'," and he pocketed the sweets
until Miss Ffitt reappeared. This she did in a very short time.
The door opened and out she came followed by Girtie's mother,
an amiable dark-eyed woman of fifty, with something of the
Amelia glance with which she swept the shop and her customers.
She smiled as Girtie slammed home the drawer of the patent till
and gave Hannibal a halfpenny.

" Well, I must be off, Mrs. Rees. See you again in a day or
two. Good-bye, Girtie darling. Good-bye little boy. How
these children eat! Yes, this gentleman's going to see me safe
into the train. High Street's so dangerous at night. Toodle-
loo."

And they were outside walking merrily up towards the High
Street.

" 'Ave a sweet ? " he asked, tendering the box of chocolates.
Miss Ffitt gave vent to a miniature and strictly private scream of
delight.

"Goodness! You're a mind-reader, Mr. Gooderich. Thanks.
Won't you? Well, it's a silly habit for men." She munched for
an instant.

" Don't go well with whisky," he remarked loftily.

" No, I suppose not. I'm glad you're not teetotal. That's
what's ruining this country, this gassy stuff men are going in
for. That lager too!" Miss Ffitt selected another chocolate
and skipped ahead to avoid a stranger.

" So long as you don't go on the booze," agreed Hannibal.

"Oh, yes! I've no patience with soakers. A man who can't
take it or leave it alone isn't a man, that's all I can say. You
said you lived in London, didn't you? Any family?"

" I ain't married," grinned Hannibal.

"Of course, I know that! I mean any brothers and sisters."

Hannibal told her.

"Goodness! And she's been away for years. And only just
goin' to be married ? "

" I don't know much about it. You see, she's a lot older 'n
me. Since the dad died I ain't seen much of 'er. I don't 'ave
much use for relations," he remarked, throwing away his ciga-
rette.

350 CASUALS OF THE SEA

"Well, I always say we don't pick our relations and we do
our friends. I'm that way, too/'

" I 'ope you'll call me one of your frien's," he said.

" Only too pleased. You must come up to the ' Stormy Petrel '
and see me."

" And Sunday? " he asked.

" Sunday ? Oh, the Mumbles ! Yes, rather. It'll be like go-
ing back to childhood's days," Miss Ffitt said, with a flicker of
sentiment.

" I wonder if you won't 'ave too many old friends to bother
about me," Hannibal remarked as they entered the station.

" Of course I shall, heaps of them," she told him. " And I
must keep them all up, and try and get more business. Business
is business, isn't it? But if you like to be a very extra-friend,
well — we do get on together, don't we ? "

" Business be blowed ! " Hannibal growled, opening the door
of a third-class carriage. Strange to say, Miss Ffitt smiled at
this heresy.

" On Sundays, yes," she replied, and her quick bright glance
fell over him so that he thrilled from head to foot. " But you'll
do me a favour, won't you ? "

" Bet your life I will."

" Only tell the other men on your ship about the ' Stormy
Petrel.' You see, it all depends on making a good start. If
Old Snickery sees business going up quick as soon as I get in,
he won't bother me afterwards." Hannibal nodded vigorously.

" And if they come, I'll make them come again. And an-
other thing, don't be silly and get jealous, will you?" He
looked up into her eager eyes and nodded again. The carriage
lights had not yet been turned up, and her face came out of
the gloom clear and piquant. Obeying some obscure impulse,
he sprang into the compartment and sat down by her.

" Now, don't be silly — well I never. There ! There ! Let
me give you one, little boy."

There was a silence, short, sweet, mysteriously significant.
A porter halted at the end of the carriage and moved a lever,
and the lights went up. Hannibal jumped out of the carriage
and closed the door. His face was transfigured. The vague
seriousness with which he was wont to look out upon the world
was supplanted by an expression of idiotic self-satisfaction. The
porter, accustomed as porters are to such expressions, passed

CASUALS OF THE SEA 351

them without comment. Strange to say, Miss Ffitt's prattle did
not run on as before. She sat with her purse in her hands and
her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. She had lost con-
fidence in herself for a moment. Hannibal reached through the
window and touched her cheek gently. Slowly her gaze rose
from the floor and met his, searchingly, pitifully, clear white and
blue, and childlike too, now that her cheery worldliness had
dropped for an instant from her. The young man smiled and
took her plump gloved hand in his.

" Good-bye," he said.

" Good-bye, little boy. Be good."

" To you, sure ! " he laughed. " Send me a picture post card."

" I don't know your address."

" S.S. Caryatid, Prince o' Wales Dock. An' tell me when
you're comin back. I'll meet the train."

The guard blew his whistle and Hannibal stepped back. The
train moved with a jerk. He stepped to the window again.

" Sunday ? " he said, and she nodded, and the train moved
out carrying her into the darkness.

" I'm on it! " he said to himself, as he strode down the street.

XIII

ENGROSSED in his work of laying the breakfast-table
the next morning, Hannibal did not hear the door lead-
ing to the Chief's room open ; the roar of the coal pour-
ing from the up-ended truck into the empty hold, the
tramp of feet overhead, the soft slither of ropes and hissing of
steam, overpowered all minor sounds. He turned and found a
sharp-eyed lady looking him over.

" Good mornin'," she said. " Are you the new boy ? "

" Yes'm."

She smiled. " From the village? " she asked, and he grinned
comprehendingly.

" That's right," he said easily, setting the cruet straight. And
then he added, " Mrs, 'Opkins ? "

" That's me," she nodded, and looked at the table.

" You'll be havin' breakfast, I s'pose," he said, opening the
drawer hastily and setting another knife and fork. " I'd'now
where the Fourth '11 sit," he mused, scratching his head.

" On a stool," she informed him genially. " You've not been
to sea before, my 'usband tells me ? "

In a few minutes she had his story. Deep called unto deep.
Hannibal perceived that her eyes, though sharp, were friendly.
Her Cockney accent smote his ear gratefully. His knowledge
of Whitechapel won her heart. The Steward's bell jangled
above them, the sound coming down through the ventilator.
Mr. Hopkins, rather grimy about the hands and face, appeared
and pointed upwards.

" Shut it," he said laconically, and Hannibal ran out and up
the ladder to put the cowl over the opening.

Evidently Mrs. Hopkins ruled her lord and his satellites while
she was at the table, though even she could not shake the mel-
ancholy from her husband's soul. The Fourth brought in a
canvas stool and sat on the outer side of the table, well within
the reach of the marmalade.

" How's Cardiff lookin', Mrs. Hopkins ? " asked the Second.

352

CASUALS OF THE SEA S5S

" I was sorry to leave it," she answered simply, passing him
his steak and onions.

"Hear that, Chief ? " he chuckled. "The Militia must be
up."

" I had to put off one very pressing invitation," Mrs. Hopkins
continued, nudging her husband, who was looking into his tea.
" Such a nice young man, off a liner."

" A liner in Cardiff," queried the Third, demolishing a saucer
of pickles which he ate, American fashion, with hot meat. " That
must be the Black Funnel Line."

" He wanted me to elope and fly with him," the lady added,
spreading butter on her toast. " He told me he'd seen my hus-
band in Singapore with a Japanese girl on each knee."

The Fourth giggled and choked over his tea.

" I wondered why he was ashore so long that night," said
the Second, and the Chief regarded him reflectively.

" These married men ! " moaned the Third, looking round for
the mustard. " Fancy ! One on each knee."

" J never had such luck," observed the Second moodily.

" Why didn't you fly with him? " enquired the Chief in hollow
accents, pointing to the bread.

" Because the half-pay might stop, old dear," his wife in-
formed him, patting his shoulder, and the Fourth, to whom half-
pay notes were as yet in the dim and terrible distance, cackled
heartlessly. " What are you laughin' at, Mr. Spink ? "

" Capt'n Briscoe's goin* to leave half-pay at home now," said
the Second.

" So I hear. What sort of man is he ? " Mrs. Hopkins asked.
" Mr. Hopkins says he's one of these here new-fangled skippers,
but that don't tell me anything."

" Chief means he's very interested in revolutions," replied
the Third Engineer, looking at the Chief, whose face was con-
cealed behind his teacup as he drained the contents. " I've heard
that he's one of those hermaphrodite curiosities who have passed
14 Mate in Stream. In case we should all suddenly jump over
the side with our pockets full of half-inch bolts, Captain Briscoe
is certified by the Board of Trade to go down below and take
charge o' the main engines."

" Oh, dry up ! " remarked the Chief, and passed his cup to
Hannibal, who was listening open-mouthed.

"Sort of all-round man?" surmised Mrs. Hopkins, who was

354 CASUALS OF THE SEA

not interested in technical details. " Doesn't any one know
anything about him or her ? "

" I daresay we'll have all we want of her if he brings her
down," the Second surmised, rescuing the marmalade from the
Fourth.

" That's a nice thing to say ! " exclaimed Mrs. Hopkins in-
dignantly. " You don't mean to tell me you're one of those mis-
erable wretches who don't approve of ladies on the ship?"

" Depends on the lady," said the Second diplomatically, as he
divided a slice of bread with extreme care.

" They take a man off his work," surmised the Third.

" Ah, I don't suppose it needs much to take you off your
work," retorted the lady, and the Third, amid some laughter,
replied that such was the fact.

" Second means he don't mind old women like you," said
the Chief, looking up. " It's the young ones that play the
devil."

Mrs. Hopkins was speechless.

" Twenty-two ain't old, Chief," sniggered the Second.

" Twenty-two ? Fifty-two, more like it," said the Chief, a
pale smile breaking over his grimed face.

" Ted ! You know I'm only forty-two " Mrs. Hopkins

pinched her husband.

"Ah, but you look fifty-two, Jane. That fast life you led
before we were married " Another pinch silenced Mr. Hop-
kins, and he resumed his contemplation of his tea.

Hannibal found as the days passed that this was the usual
tenor of the conversation when Mrs. Hopkins took her meals
in the mess-room. Her complete and contemptuous confidence
in her husband, her genuine interest in everybody, her total
lack of ladylike stand-offishness, her genial scepticism, her un-
mistakable London origin, all these things attracted the young
man in the mess-room, and he became her willing slave. In due
time, in a manner that is a secret among women and will die with
them, she led him to talk of his present life, and the grotesque
desire to make money. He, the refugee from the Brown Box,
desired money! It was Mrs. Hopkins who took him up and
showed him the promised land. She multiplied his three pounds
by twelve, and the result, a year's pay all found, took his breath
away. A young man would have to toil all his life in a Little
Brown Box to save thirty-six pounds."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 355

" Of course he would," Mrs. Hopkins said ; " and when you
get on, you'll have more than that. But," she lifted a warning
finger, " mind the foreign ports, my boy."

Hannibal nodded. He supposed so, though he couldn't be
expected to know. He did know the money went quick enough
in Swansea. It was irresistible, but very expensive, that nightly
visit to Miss Ffitt at the " Stormy Petrel."

Of course Mrs. Hopkins was interested in Miss Ffitt, for
Mrs. Hopkins had herself been a barmaid at Plaistow at a time
when Mr. Hopkins had been paid off with two years' wages.
He had been rendered abjectly miserable by the possession of
so much money, and had requested her to take charge of them
both. She believed that this was really a woman's proper des-
tiny, to look after a man's money for him and see that he didn't
buy rubbish with it. So she lived cheerfully in a little house
(freehold) in Penarth, among scores of other sailors' wives,
thoroughly satisfied with her condition, receptive of all the stories
she heard about husbands and sons in far-distant lands, and
scornful of them all. Having no children, she felt a brusque
and kindly affection for those children of the sea over whom
her husband was supposed to reign. For Hannibal her London
origin predisposed her in the favour. The Londoner, though
destitute of the savage clannishness of the Scot, Tyke, or Welsh,
yet has a certain community of feeling. He likes to call Lon-
don " the village," he accepts meekly the alien's extensive and
peculiar knowledge of the metropolis, and he will never make
you understand exactly why he loves London, for he will never
make the attempt. Certainly Hannibal never did.

Mrs. Hopkins, I was saying, was interested in Miss Ffitt, for
she was an ex-barmaid. I am inclined to think that she had
been a successful barmaid, though not in the way Miss Ffitt
or Miss Bevan of Barry were successful. Mrs. Hopkins prob-
ably had to do with men of middle-age, men who would have
regarded ebullient conversation with pained surprise, men who
talked over affairs at little tables, and went out with their wives
on Saturdays. She had no cash-register in her bar in those
days, no gramophone, no sandwiches or lager beer. Mr. Hop-
kins, for example, was not the man to be lured by fluffed hair
and effervescent chatter. No doubt there was in the Penarth
home a tasteful little presentation clock or card-salver from her
middle-aged customers, as a token of their esteem. Mrs. Hop-

356 CASUALS OF THE SEA

kins was the sort of woman who grows a little more frivolous
as she grows older. Some twenty or thirty grey hairs were
apparent to the relentless observer on the top of her head, and
the quantity that came out occasionally made her stop and think,
comb in hand; but her heart was very green, and the nice lad
with the brown eyes and his Miss Ffitt interested her. She
would stand at the door of her husband's room, when he was out
on deck or down below, and talk while Hannibal did his work.

" Why don't you do something with more money ? " she asked
one morning.

" What else can I do ? "

" You could go in the engine-room, couldn't you? "

" Me ? " incredulously.

" Why not ? This isn't man's work."

"Not this?"

" No ; it's girl's work, washin' dishes. You're strong enough.
You ought to go in for something more — more — I don't know
how to say it exactly. You aren't afraid o' bein' dirty, are
you?"

" I don't know, Ma'am. I never thought of it."

"Some men are. Others seem to enjoy it. Mr. Hopkins
doesn't think he's doin' any work if he isn't smothered."

" I don't see 'ow I can change now," Hannibal said doubt-
fully. " The chief wouldn't let me."

" I'll make him! " she said promptly.

Hannibal advanced another step on his upward road to man-
hood. He paused in his work of polishing the big lamp in the
mess-room and put his hand on his hip, looking frankly into
Mrs. Hopkins' sharp eyes.

" Why d'you bother ? " he demanded, an involuntary gruffness
in his voice.

Mrs. Hopkins was taken a little aback. Then she smiled.

" Ask Miss Ffitt," she answered lightly, and retreated into her
husband's room.

He did not do that. Youth-like he was not sufficiently self-
conscious to bear such instruction in mind until Sunday, when
they merged into the holiday throng that spotted the cliff
walks on the Mumbles or fretted the evening skyline on the
pier. And even had he asked her, it is doubtful whether he
would have received any truthful reply. Had she told him, it
is probable that she would have lost him. And Eleonora Ffitt,

CASUALS OF THE SEA 357

though she had never heard of Bernard Shaw and would not
have understood him if she had, had no intention of losing
Hannibal. He was netted more safely than he knew. With
woman's cunning she held back from him in the glaring lights
of the bar of the " Stormy Petrel," and in the noise and rumour
of the town, and waited until they sat above the gentle wash
of the rock-bound shallows. With infinite artistry she allowed
herself to become identified in his dreams with the harsh cry of
the gulls, the presence and murmur of the sea. He remembered
that evening always when away; the silver hoop of the moon,
serene across the shimmering channel* the subdued whispers of
lovers, the drone of the music, the clash of the tiny waves
round the solemn wide-sweeping lantern on the reef, the long
crescent of lighted roadway that curved with inimitable beauty
into the mysterious darkness of the port, the lamp-spattered love-
liness of the encircling hills. Of all this, in his memory, she was*
a part. Her warm womanhood became inextricably mingled
with that Nature toward which he strained with inarticulate
desire. So he recalled her out on the tropic seas, and with that
evening still vivid within him, he worked out his probation and
returned to fulfil his destiny, a casual of the sea.

XIV

LOADED to her summer marks, the Caryatid, in the
endless hours of the middle watch, lay waiting for the
tide. It was that hour when time seems to stop and
the stars, dragging slowly across the sky, fade im-
perceptibly into that first faint premonition of the dawn. On
the coal-littered decks, cumbered with wide-straddling booms and
the gleaming sheets of thin iron over which the coal slides to
its place, the silence hung heavily. Now and again a restless
sailor came out of the dim-lighted galley and hung, listening,
over the outer side, the smoke of his pipe passing like a spirit
above his head. Out on the shiny water loomed the tall hulls
of the old steamers at the buoys. They lay there patiently
month by month, awaiting their turn to be broken up. They
had run their race, poor casuals of the sea; with cold hearts and
sightless portholes they strained gently at their moorings, and
their pale figure-heads stared in blind agony to the westward,
as though they prayed that the end might be soon.

The hours dragged on, and with infinite deliberation the eastern
sky became informed with that awesome pallor that precedes
the sunrise. An iron door clanged sharply on the Caryatid, a
rat, creeping craftily along the plating to the pump, fled in
wild terror beneath a winch, there was a blaze of brightness at
the engine-room door, and once again, silence and darkness. The
Second, his pipe blowing great clouds, seated himself on a plugged
ventilator near the galley, and folding his arms, looked out upon
the familiar scene. So still he was you would have thought him
graven in stone, save for the dense rolling upward of the smoke.
In a few moments another ghost appeared from the port alley-
way, a dark, huddled figure in a heavy coat of pilot cloth, with
the cap pulled low over the eyes, the collar turned up, and the
hands in the pockets. Quietly he moved across the deck, now
grey against the white galley, now silhouetted against the glow-
ing fire.

"All right?" he whispered to the Second, who did not turn
his head.

358

CASUALS OF THE SEA 359

" All right, Chief," he answered.

" Wing fires away? "

" All away," replied the Second.

" What's she carryin' ? "

" Sixty-five," said the Second, meaning a hundred and sixty-
five.

" Dampers shut ? "

" Aye."

There was a pause. As they stood there, a thick-set man in
a big woollen muffler came down from the bridge deck and spoke.
It was the Old Man.

"All ready, Chief?"

" All ready, sir," said the Chief.

" Windlass? " the Captain's eyes glittered.

" All on, sir," muttered the Second.

"How's things, Cap'n? " whispered the Chief, looking on the
ground. "All well at home? "

The Captain threw back his head and laughed.

"Champion!" he said. "Time of my life. I'll tell you an-
other time. But " As he paused the Second twisted round

on the ventilator and looked at him. Captain Briscoe took out a
cigar and bit the end.

"Eh? "asked the Chief.

" Think of it! " The Master threw out his hands. " Think,
man. I never thought of it before. You're a married man,
Chief? You know. Leavin' the warm bed "

Neither answered him. The Second resumed his contempla-
tion of the grey waters. All the east was aflame with rose and
silver. The dock lights shrank to pale points of flickering radi-
ance. Heavy boots drummed on the bridge deck, voices growled
in the distance, the noise of a chain block flung down crashed
against their ears, an avalanche of sound. Another man sud-
denly appeared above them and blew a shrill call on his whistle.
The world of men was awake. The Old Man lit his cigar and
pulled himself up the ladder with his brown hairy hands. A
gold signet ring flashed on the third finger.

" H'm ! " The Second shifted his feet and waited for his
companion to make a remark.

" It's a hell of a life," whispered the Chief, and moved slowly
across the deck. The Second wondered if it was. It seemed as
though he were not alone in feeling the inexpressible sadness of

360 CASUALS OF THE SEA

the dawn. What a banal remark! A hell of a life! As if he
didn't know that. Even he had some knowledge of the tragedy
of the warm bed. . . . He stretched, twisted round so that he
could see the galley clock, and relit his pipe. He slipped from
the ventilator and disappeared into the steering house. Put-
ting his lips to a tube he blew, and a faint querulous whistle
sounded below in the engine-room. He looked down solemnly on
the scene of his continual toil, critical, not ill-pleased. She was
a good old girl ! The Third swung up the ladders, his long oily
arms playing with a prehensile grace upon the shining rails.

" What's to do ? " he asked, wiping his face with his sweat-
rag.

" Coffee," said the Second. " What's the steam? "

" Seventy," said the Third, meaning a hundred and seventy.

" Then she'll blow off, sure as hell," said the Second gloomily.
And he plunged with the speed of long use down the ladders.
He passed along the plates, dived into a tunnel between the
boilers and emerged into the stokehold. Two Greeks and a
German were sitting under the ventilator.

" Look at it ! " he snarled, dragging the fire doors open and
then flinching from the white glare. " Why don't you put green
coal on Look at it ! Gimme the shovel."

" She's all right, Mister Seccon," clicked a Greek.

"Is she hell?" He seized a bucket of water and drenched
some fine coal, turning it with the shovel.

" Put it on," he ordered, dropping the tool and peering at the
gauges.

Sullenly they obeyed him, and the German disappeared into
the bunkers. The Second returned to the engine-room, looked
at the water, moved the throttle of the dynamo engine a fraction
of an inch, and wiping his face, seated himself on the vice-bench,
and filled his pipe. It was a habit with him to meditate upon
the hellishness of his life. He felt resentful that a man like this
skipper, who had just got married, should realise it so soon.
After all, why didn't the man bring her to sea with him, if he
wished to? What did skippers know of the reality of loneliness.
They were free to go as they pleased, to sleep, to gorge, to find
fault. There was the Chief too, mewing like a kitten because his
wife was gone home to Cardiff. What about him, Hilary John
Jesmond of Jarrow-on-Tyne, First-class Certificate and Engineer-
Lieutenant R.N.R.? Well, perhaps he ought to get married.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 361

He was engaged to two or three girls, certainly, but marriage was
a step ! He had arrived afresh at this conclusion, that marriage
was a step, when the Third descended, followed by the Fourth,
who was rubbing his eyes, and Hannibal, who looked as if he
would like to rub his, but was too occupied with the coffee.

" What's to do? " asked the Third, sipping the coffee. " The
pilot is in no hurry."

" He says," remarked the Fourth, " the gate's opening but he'll
not shift her for another half-hour. What's the time ? Just gone
four. Seems to me I've only been turned in five minutes."

" You'll die in your bunk," commented the Second.

" I'm sure I hope so, mister. I don't want to die down here."

" I've lived down here," said the Second pensively, taking a
large bite of his toast, " for sixteen years. What a life ! Once
I had ideas. All gone now. My dungarees are dirty and God
hates me."

" I don't reckon he takes that much trouble over sailor-men,"
muttered the Third, drinking deeply. "Why jouse yourself,
mister? " His drawn, slag-grey face creased into smiles, he
moved his feet in a rhythmic rattle on the polished plates and be-
gan to sing:

Oh I met a maid on Hornsey Rise,

And kissed her on the lips,
I looked into her limpid eyes

And told her all the dear old lies,

But she started of in wild surprise

And her hands went on her hips, —
Said she, I'm the wife of a sailor-man

Gone down to the sea in ships!

" Stow it ! " growled the Second. " Isn't the Johnny Walker
out of you yet? Hie, boy! what's the matter? You look as if
they were all dead."

Hannibal, leaning against the hand-rail of the ladder, laughed.
His face was still soft and puffed under the eyes with sleep, and
dark rings encircled them. His mouth was dry and distasteful
from tobacco and drink, and his mind muggy.

" I was only thinkin'," lie said, and shifted his feet.

" You shouldn't do that," warned the Fourth, measuring
his toast with his eye. " It drives men crazy sometimes at
sea."

The Third pinched the young man's ear.

362 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" It's a hell of a life, eh ? " he whispered, and the Second stirred
in irritation.

" What do you know about it ? " he asked in annoyance. The
speaking tube whistle whined, and he leaned over and drew it out.
"Ullo, -sir! — Ah! Seventy or thereabouts. Half an hour?
All right, sir. Yes," he resumed, putting the whistle into the
tube again, " you think you have a rotten time, don't you ?
There's another up there. Now what has he to worry about?
I'm here. Why can't he stay in his room and leave me alone?
There's the skipper too, tellin' me its a hell of a life, just be-
cause he's got to leave a nice young wife at home."

" You'd grouse, too, if you'd just got married," said the Third,
boring him with his eye. " Especially if she's young. And all
the time you're at sea, thinkin' and thinkin' of the men round her,
and you far away on the ocean. Wouldn't you ? "

" Easy to talk," snapped the Second. " The younger you are
the more you yap. Here's the Mess. I daresay he's thinkin'
how hard it is to go away, eh ? "

" Yes," said Hannibal simply. " I'm engaged, mister."

" You ! There you are ! " said the Second in moody triumph.
" I told you so. Silly young blighter. Who is it ? "

14 That's — that's my business, mister," replied Hannibal. " I
was only answering your question. An' I'd like to know if the
Chief said anythin' to you about me — coming down 'ere ? "

" What's that ? " said the Fourth, as the Second shook his
head.

" I don't approve of it," remarked the Second, finishing his
coffee. " We'll see later. I expect some o' these noble fire-
boys'U slope in Las Palmas. What d'you want to change for? "
he demanded.

" More money, sir," said Hannibal. " I can do man's work
now."

" You think so. Chasin' a coal-barrow in the tween-decks is
very different from washin' dishes."

" I know it is. There's no reason why I shouldn't 'ave a go at
it."

" What you goin' to do, buy a farm ? "

" No. Git married."

They stared at him, these young men, in awe, as he collected
the empty mugs. Somehow the simple statement had set him
away beyond them. He was going to get married ! The Second

CASUALS OF THE SEA 363

slipped from his seat, and went over to the gauges, patting the
curved syphon pipes with his hand. He returned as Hannibal
put his foot on the ladder.

" Forget it ! " he called, in a strange voice.

u Not me," said Hannibal, going up.

" He's not plumb," said the Third, watching him. " The ex-
citement has turned his Drain. Spink, why don't you get mar-
ried? You look all right when your face is washed."

" I've tried, often," said that young man, pulling a wad of
waste from a bundle in the store. " But it's no use, they won't
look at you if they think you haven't got a ticket."

They moved, as by some subconscious thought common to them
all, over to the telegraph.

" Is the whistle on, Spink? " asked the Second.

" Aye, on stabbard main," replied the Fourth, and leaned
against the wheel of the reversing-engine.

14 You know what's the matter with us ? " queried the Third,
blinking. " We're all scared."

"Scared?"

" Ah, scared. We come to sea and get into the sea-habit,
and then when we go ashore, we're like damned kids. I think
it must be the condensed milk gets into our blood and we funk
comin' to the point. See that young feller? He's only been at
sea three days and he goes up town and gets engaged. Says he's
goin' to get married. You daren't say that, Jack. Nor you,
Spink?"

" I wish I was a rich lady's pet-dog," remarked the Fourth.
The whistle whined, choked, and then burst into a terrifying
roar above them.

" So do I, but what's the use ? Pet-dogs aren't bred on con-
densed milk." The Second looked up and saw the Chief gazing
mournfully down from the steering house.

" Throw her over," he said. " Spink, open up and forget it.
You'll be out on the West'ard to-morrow. All right, sir ! Stand
by! Where's that greaser? Here, Snyder, put the syphons in.
Right, Spink? Swab the tails, Snyder."

With a great sigh the cranks moved, woke up, jerked back-
ward, and came to rest.

" Condensed milk ! " said the Second to himself indignantly,
as he peered round the engines. " What does he know about
it"

364 CASUALS OF THE SEA

High up on the flying bridge Captain Briscoe walked to and
fro, a proud man. Preoccupied with his own private pleasure
and pain, he yet watched with relentless attention the manoeuvres
of the ship ahead. She was the Vechstrom, a slim, long-nosed
three-thousand-ton freighter from Rotterdam. Captain Briscoe
found time to envy her commander. With admiring eyes he
watched her swing round as her twin-screws revolved, one against
the other, churning the dock-water into cream-coloured foam.
And then, as her sharp thin nose pointed toward the open gates,
both engines went full ahead, beating the foam into tumultuous
waves, her whistle blared, and she was away. Seventeen knots
she went, that little clipper! with her rows of steel derricks, her
self-trimming holds, her patent rudder, her collapsible lifeboats,
and all the rest of her. Captain Briscoe gazed sourly at the tri-
colour flag flaunting on her flush poop. Damn these Dutchmen !
Why didn't British owners have modern ships ? To-morrow night
she would be safe in Rotterdam. And he resumed his scrutiny
of the check-ropes, glancing first at the Chief Mate on the fore-
castle and then at the Second away aft. As the latter swivelled
his signal disc from red to white, the Old Man raised his hand.
Mr. Cadoxton, natty and fresh-shaven, thrust the telegraph
slow ahead. As the Old Man passed him he spoke with the
seriousness of youth.

" Funny thing, sir ! I was looking at the articles last
night, checking the discharge-books, and I noticed some-
thing."

"Eh?"

*' The mess-room Steward, sir. His name is a rather unusual
one. I don't know whether you noticed it."

"Eh?"

" Gooderich, sir."

" Give her a kick astern, slow," said the Old Man, watching
the pilot's hands. " Port ! You at the wheel there." In the
wheel-house behind the glass windows and teak framings the
round face of Drevis Noordhoff could be seen at the wheel.
" What's that you said, Mr. Cadoxton ? "

" Not a usual name, sir,*' said Mr. Cadoxton, deferentially. He
was a rather exasperating young man, with his courtly manner
and boyish face. He had grown up in the new tradition into
which the Old Man desired to be an adept, and he had a way of
impressing his superiority upon people.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 365

" No," snapped Captain Briscoe, relapsing into the older tra-
dition. "What of it?"

" Well — shall we ease her, sir ? "

" Stop her! Mess-room, did you say? "

" Yes, sir. Joined in London. Belongs there, I believe. He
hasn't a discharge, of course."

Captain Briscoe walked up and down, making signs to Tommy
at the wheel and Waving to the men on the pier heads. He
remembered now. It was the lad in the tobacconist's shop, of
course. Certainly it was, as the Third Mate said, curious. He
turned suddenly and walked back.

" Half," he said. " Port there — that'll do. Slow, Mr. Ca-
doxton."

" Quarter-cheek's away, sir," said Cadoxton.

" Half, then. What made you mention it? "

" Well, as a matter of fact, sir, the Third Engineer was
telling Mr. Brail of a friend of his of that name, and Mr. Brail,
he said his brother-in-law on the Torso knew a lady of the same
name, you see, and so "

" What was he on the Torso? "

" Mate, sir, I believe."

The Old Man turned away again. He leaned over the end
of the bridge and watched the piers receding. Once more he
was going out to sea. But this time he was conscious of a dif-
ference. He had left something behind. As the distance widened
he felt as though an invisible thread were drawn taut. She
was already far away in her little flat. A sudden pain shot
through his heart. Had he been a fool? He was terribly
proud, this master mariner, proud of his career, of his yeoman
ancestry, of his ship, of his wife. But had he been a fool over
the wife? Had his impulse led him wrong? Somehow this
news of the lad in the mess-room disturbed him, he scarcely knew
why. Surely he had gone into the whole business with his eyes
open. Minnie had not deceived him. No, dammit, she had
graciously accepted him. The pilot touched him on the shoul-
der.

" Pleasant voyage, Cap'en."

They shook hands and the pilot went down to wait for the
tug. Captain Briscoe resumed his thoughts. Was this to be
liis portion for months now? He had read of jealousy. Was
he to dream of that little flat? to pace the bridge at night think-

366 CASUALS OF THE SEA

ing of her as he knew her in Antwerp, of other men ringing the
bell, and of coming in? Oh, that would be a hell of a life ! The
perspiration stood on his face though the morning wind was cool.
He went down and drank a glass of whisky. What was his
nerve coming to? He understood now why married men stood
motionless by the rail, looking out across the sea. As he went
into the chart-room to set the course, he bethought himself of
prayer. Could he pray? God! What a life!

Mr. Hopkins stood on the lee-side of his house and in-
spected the discharge water as it foamed below him. Like most
men with a ruined digestion he rarely looked happy. The
Second Mate had stopped on his way to the bridge to inform him
that the Old Man had written a ten-page letter to his wife the
night before, and he had received the news with calmness, merely
spitting into the sea. What fools men were! He listened to
the beat of the engine, suspicious of trouble. He was always
anxious until the Second came up and stood by the rail smoking,
silent and disdainful, as though wondering what land was for
anyhow. He would look thus at the eternal hills round the
Piraeus, at the glittering domes of Venice, a sarcastic sphinx.
As he came up now, the Mumbles Head received his disparage-
ment. The Chief looked at him furtively. What was he think-
ing about, this wiry and tireless lieutenant? He wasn't mar-
ried. Was he disappointed because he never attained promotion?
What a fool! He was better where he was. He could eat his
meals anyhow — blessed privilege !

" All right ? " he asked, looking towards the shore.

" Intermediate Rod's blowin' a bit. I'll take up," said the
young man.

" Aye, it'll take up," echoed the Chief. " Swab it good."

An expression of contempt crept into the Second's face, but
he did not answer. When the Chief looked round to speak to
him again he was gone, and the Third went past him with a long
slouching stride. He was going to the forecastle, Mr. Hopkins
knew. Some damned scum was sleeping off the drink instead of
taking his watch on the fires. The Chief let his mind wander
gently to the days when he was young and indignant, when he
fought with the soddened and desperate seamen who fill the stoke-
holds of our merchant navy. His hand wandered to his thigh
whence he had once pulled a Dago's knife. Fierce work on those

CASUALS OF THE SEA 367

Manzanillo boats in the old days, eh ? He saw the Third return-
ing along the foredeck pushing and punching a reeling brown-
bearded man. Up the ladder to the bridge deck he came some-
how, pummelled from behind, falling prone by the cabin door.
The Third heaved him up and along again until they reached Mr.
Hopkins. Mr. Hopkins regarded the brown-bearded man with
disfavour. His big blue eyes were bleared with drink, his mouth
worked convulsively and his clothes were dropping from him.
He leaned his shoulders hard against the house, and his head
sank.

" Goin' to turn to ? " asked the Third, shaking him.

" What's his name? " asked the Chief.

" I dunno. He's a Dutchman."

" What's your name ? " repeated the Chief.

The man's eyes opened, blinked, and closed again, as he hic-
coughed. Four bells rang clear and distinct on the morning
air, and a sailor ran up the bridge-ladder to relieve at the wheel.
Tommy came clattering down to get his coffee, running along the
alley-way. As he passed the little group, the fireman's eyes
opened and roved round glassily. They settled on the boy's
face as he stood there trying to pass.

" What's your name? "

" Jesus ! My name ! " The man struggled to his feet and
stood grasping the rail. A shudder of nausea ran over him and
he raised his brown-bearded face to the blue sky. . . .

" Better get down below," said Mr. Hopkins to the Third.
" Leave him to me."

Slowly the man turned his eyes aft, where the boy was talking
to the Bo'sun.

" My name," he whispered huskily. " Mister, I'm bad.
Lemme go and turn in, for God's sake." Again he looked.
" Better this afternoon, sir."

" Git out of it," said Mr. Hopkins, turning away.

Hannibal was fixing up a photograph in his berth when Tommy
came in.

" You got a gel all right, all right," he remarked approvingly.
" We'll write post-cards each place, eh ? "

" Sure," assented Hannibal. " Letters too."

" I don't know what to say in a letter, in English," said
Tommy, feeling elbow-deep in his canvas bag. " I only write

368 CASUALS OF THE SEA

to 'im in a letter/' and he nodded to a sketch of a clean-shaven
man with a loose tie that was pinned over the lad's bunk. Tommy
fled out again and left Hannibal to examine the picture at leisure.
Tommy was not loquacious about his friend. He called him
" the man dat looks after me." He had a bundle of long letters
from him, addressed to " Mein Fliegende Hollander/' which
Tommy had explained to Hannibal's puzzled ears. It appeared
that this man " made pictures " and had " bags of money/' that
he had been a passenger on a ship, the old Eumenides, where
Tommy had been cook's boy, and he had taken an interest in him.
And being something of a power, through relatives in Billiter
Lane, he had got the Amsterdammer on the Caryatid as a sailor.
That was why, Tommy said, in answer to Hannibal's query, he
was in a room amidships instead of in the forecastle. Some day,
when he had finished his time, the picture-man was going to
get him a mate's job, and then he was made! "You see,"
Tommy had said simply, " he ain't got no liddle boys, and he
want me to be smart an* get on, and den, he'll help me. When
I done four years, I'll get my ticket an' go third mate. I call
him my fader, 'cause I never had one, see." Hannibal thought
of this now as he put up the photo of Miss Ffitt on the bulk-
head over the settee, and his mouth hardened. There was no
" picture-man " to take an interest in him, that was plain, nor
did he want one. He was going to make his own way. He
had something to work for now, something to think about.
Unlike Captain Briscoe, no doubt assailed the young man's
mind. Nellie wasn't that sort. Of course, she had to be easy
and good-natured to the customers, but what of that? It was
business. His luck almost took his breath away. She had told
him that old Snickery would have to vest the licence in some one
else, as he could not hold the new premises as well. And he
wanted to hold the new premises very badly, for they were
going to pull it down later on, when it would be valuable. Any-
thing might happen, they decided as they talked it over. Hanni-
bal wanted to rise to this new development. With Nellie he
felt it possible to accomplish wonders. He would hold the Chief
to that promise Mrs. Hopkins had extracted from him and try
and save money. By money Hannibal did not mean thousands.
He really had no conception of a hundred pounds. He was like
those Bushmen who cannot count beyond a certain figure. Fifty
was a golden dream, but he determined to get as near as he

CASUALS OF THE SEA 369

could to it. By the time lie went in to tidy up the Second's room
he felt confident about fifty. And then, coming back again, roll-
ing home across the sea ! He tried to realise his position. Out-
ward bound, and all the world to see !

XV

WHEN he turned out one morning at half-past four
and looking through the port saw no land, he felt
that the irrevocable had happened. For the first
time he was out of sight of England. Tommy,
taking his hour on deck, looked out of sleepy eyes at the round
cloudless sky-line and said that that was nothing. Hannibal sup-
posed it was. He grew accustomed to being told that the things
he felt were nothing. This nihilism of the seafarer is a sort
of half-way house, where he dwells awhile before he goes on to
the final acceptance and despair. But Hannibal did not think
it was nothing. He thought it was wonderful, these familiars
of the sea. Day by day, he would watch the great pano-
rama, the sudden rifting of the clouds, the downward dart
of the straight strong beams like the pillars of a golden tower
reaching up to God. He saw the black massing of the rain-
clouds, the swift movements of their shadows across the sea,
the gulls wheeling in endless circles above his head, black against
the sunlight, white as snow against the clouds. He saw huge
liners loom up on the horizon, burst into clear view, with all
their panoply of boats and ventilators and glittering windows,
flash past with proud funnels belching smoke, and drop out
of sight. He saw oil-tanks towing slowly and painfully east-
ward, the stunted little steamers with their ugly high-perched
bridges, the unwieldy lighters with their tall steel masts and
solitary deck-houses. Humbly indeed they swam on the ocean,
bereft even of a name, and expressing, in their dangerousness
and preciousness the ignoble ideals of those who send them
forth. He saw tiny fishing boats bobbing buoyantly as they
toiled to reap a scanty harvest on the broad fields of the Bay.
He saw white winged sailing ships come up out of the dawn,
flying clouds above grey hulls that lay over to the wind. And
when the weather changed and the Caryatid bored her way
through the sloping green, when the sky was thick with great
clouds racing easterly and the wind-swept decks wet with the
leaping spray, he saw the sea in a fresh phase. For hours,

370

CASUALS OF THE SEA 371

when his work was done, he watched the mountainous waves roll-
ing up and crashing against the stubborn bows, listened to the
boom and rattle of the plating, the sough of the wind in the
ventilators and the scuffle of the propeller when the stern lifted
in the swell. And when the weather roughened, he would stand
by the galley and watch the green seas leap over the bulwarks
and thunder upon the deck in furious splendour. Sometimes
they missed and he would wait breathlessly for the next. Like
most ships which have had their load-lines raised, the Caryatid
was a wet ship. Sea after sea came over the weather side, and
Hannibal would note the sailors with their heads bowed, drenched
to the skin, hanging to the life-lines that ran along on either
side. This was summer weather in a steamer! To them it was
nothing. They did not call it going to sea, these leathery beings
who had been round the Horn in sail before Hannibal was
born. This was summer time. Day by day they chipped and
scraped and washed the paintwork, moving about with a sort of
lumbering ease adapted to their arduous and humdrum labour.
Only in the forecastle, where Hannibal did not see them, did they
drop their mask and try, pathetically enough, to be human. He
saw the black squad too, now and again, dark forms hunched
against the funnel-casing awaiting the eight-bell chime: or he
would come upon a trimmer, emerging from the hatch, filthy
and breathless, his sweat-rag in his teeth and a smoking slush-
lamp in his hand. The Second would often appear abruptly
from the sliding coal, and discuss professional problems with
the Chief, who awaited him. Day by day and night by night
each one of these men had his appointed hour and toil. He
saw the Old Man in his double-breasted coat with the brass
buttons and his long sea-boots, pacing the bridge like a caged
animal, silent and supreme. It was inconceivable that he should
he Minnie's husband, grotesque, absurd. Once or twice, he
had paused in his walk and eyed Hannibal as he hurried to
and from the Steward's pantry. What was he thinking
about? Was he angry because his wife's brother was a mess-
room steward ? Did he know ? Hannibal gave it up. He knew
so little about his sister. Only when in thought he placed her
side by side with Nellie did he feel certain of his ground.
Nellie was different from Minnie. He felt that. There was
something strange about Minnie, superior as she was. With
the sublime omniscience of youth he brought all morality to the

372 CASUALS OF THE SEA

measure of his embryo mind. And in his embryo mind the thing
that was strange was antagonistic. That was why he loved the
eternal heave and rhythm of the ocean. But in his love for
Nellie he instinctively shrank from anything so strange as Min-
nie. Why did his mother never speak of her? She must be
more than strange, more than antagonistic; there must be some-
thing evil in her life. To him evil was not a devil with horns
and tail, not even a fiery furnace. It was rather a vague un-
easiness, a dark cloud at the back of his mind. To Tommy it
was something sharp and very real, hunger and the bodily pain
of cruel whipping. But Hannibal had never been very hungry
nor had he been drilled in the religion of an avenging deity.
He did not know what it was, save that when he thought of
Nellie and Minnie, he was afraid. And yet, there was the
Old Man. He gave it up and went on living his own life, dream-
ing of the future, and watching with insatiable interest the com-
mon flow and return of sea and sky.

And as they drove southward towards the Canaries, a new
wonder came to him. The clouds rolled away across the world
and the air grew warmer. Down in the engine-room Hannibal
thought it unbearable. In that maze of flying rods and gleam-
ing metal, men toiled, stripped to the under-vests. The oil-
laden atmosphere stifled him, but the Third sneered amiably
at the bare suggestion that it was anything unusual. With the
sweat running from his grey face in streams, he would tell the
young man that it was " just a nice workin' heat." And he would
lift the chatty from its hook in the ventilator and drink long
and thirstily. " You're not born yet," he would tell Hannibal.
" You'll be marked before you see old England again. This is
nothing. The stufF'll be up at the top o' the thermometer and
tappin' to be let out, yet."

" Is it 'ot in the bunkers ? " Hannibal asked timorously, lifting
his mouth fish-like to the cool of the ventilator.

" Hot in the bunkers ? Just a wee. Still set on it ? Ah !
You'll get a bellyful before you're paid off* then. Fine healthy
exercise for a young chap, trimmin' is ? "

The Chief saluted the lower parallels by changing into a weird
costume of stained khaki, and ordering Hannibal to remove a
blanket from the bed. That bed-making was a trial to him at
first. The engineers one and all broke out into open insurrection
over his entirely new and original method of folding the bed-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 373

clothes so that no mortal could insinuate himself into them. So
he went humbly to Tommy, who knew everything, and asked to be
shown how. Tommy's blue eyes opened in wonder upon a
young man of eighteen not knowing how to do a simple little
thing like that.

" You thick ! " he said, grinning. " 'Ere, I'll show you." He
dropped the clothes off his bunk and began. " First," he said,
" take all dese off, see, and put them on the settee. Now tuck
in de bottom blanket. Engineers 'ave sheets, see? Den put de
piller straight an' tidy. Den you vatch me. Take de blanket
and de sheet an' lay 'em along de edge o' de bunk like so,
see?"

Swiftly Tommy laid the bedding across the bunk-board and
folded the tops neatly back.

" Who taught you, Tommy ? " asked Hannibal, trying to imi-
tate him.

" Me? De steward o' that German boat, 'Amburg-Amerika
Line, 'e show me. It was 'im gimme de belt, an' den I run away,
see."

" That feller's a good friend to you," said Hannibal, remem-
bering what Tommy had told him, and nodding at the photo-
graph.

" Sure thing ! He gimme my sextant, and plenty clo'es. He's
a Man!" stammered Tommy, a far-away look in his eyes. "A
Man, by God! "

"Why don't he get you a job ashore?" asked Hannibal.

" I dunno. Not so easy. I'm a sea-boy, I am. I reckon it's
got to be. And it ain't so bad, if you're smart and try to get
on, eh? Everybody got to work! He works, making pictures
same as Rembrandt. When we come back I'm going to see him
in London. He's away now."

Bit by bit Hannibal, friendly-eyed and unobtrusive, learned
the obscure histories of his shipmates. Bit by bit he picked
them up, piece here, piece there, a vivid patch next week, and
tried in his unskilled way to put them together. What a won-
derful patch-work it was! He would talk at times to the ap-
prentices, who had imagination, and they helped him to join
up stray fragments of gossip. They told him of Mr. Cadoxton's
lordly connexions, of the Second Mate's bigamy case a year be-
fore, and they fed him full with amazing stories of the Old
Man's wife. He was interested in this last, as may be imag-

374 CASUALS OF THE SEA

ined. The senior apprentice certainly told his tale well, though
Mr. Cadoxton's artistry was visible in the sketches. But Hanni-
bal's was a detached interest tinctured with a furtive pride in
his exclusive knowledge of the lady. They told him, too, of
the Old Man, how he tramped the bridge hour after hour star-
ing across the sea, how he let meal after meal pass without
uttering a word, thinking, thinking. " It's on his mind," said
the senior apprentice darkly. " He was going to bring her the
the voyage, but Mr. Cadoxton says she's quite impossible. He
tried it on the Torso, you see, and he had to leave. She kidded
him she's got bags of money, you see, and now he's stung, he
can't forget it. I shouldn't be surprised if he jumped over the
side one of these days. My brother was with a skipper who cut
his throat." And so on. Hannibal listened to it all, the inane
conjectures of the sea. He could not help seeing that, though
very human, these men were a race apart. They believed all
this cackle that passed from lip to lip, yet it altered their atti-
tudes toward one another not at all. . . . They accepted man as
desperately wicked, they knew him to be inconceivably foolish,
and these special examples were only faint outlines of what they
might be. Under them all the screw kicked them ever onward,
over their heads the sun rode with undeviating rectitude. What
recked it, if men were purblind and given over to a lie? It was
but a tale to be told in the dog-watches. The iron grip of the
articles held them for a time, and then, when they j ostled into the
shipping office once more, they would fall apart, disintegrate, and
their gossip would become a lurid fable, succulent but incredible.
But to the Old Man, it was no fable for idle hours. As they
slid through the summer sea the possible became a nightmare
certainly, and he writhed with no soul to ease him. He re-
membered with shame his indiscreet outburst before the Second
and Chief, when the bitterness of the dawn was upon him. Me-
chanically he took his bearings, checked the reckonings, and
wrote his night-orders. Over and over in his room he fumbled
with the scanty notes that she had written him. She had no gift
for correspondence, she had said lightly, as she held the match
for his cigar. He groaned inwardly as he recalled that every
one of her charms was the charm of the odalisque, save that im-
maculate calm, that maddening indifference; and was not that
after all a supreme effort of the genius of the odalisque? She
had led him on by thrusting him back. . . . Yes, by God ! Sh6

CASUALS OF THE SEA 375

had sent him away. And he — the infatuate fool — but stay, he
loved her !

He would drop his cigar into the tray as he sat in his room,
and stare with strained eyes into vacancy, holding the edge of
the table. Sometimes he would draw out his writing-materials
and begin a letter. My own dear darling little wife, and so sit
an hour on end, in an agony of doubt. Sometimes he would
start up, resolved to break the spell, light a fresh cigar, drink a
stiff peg of whisky, and go along to the Chief's room. But the
Chief did not understand, and resented interruptions when he
was reading Scott. He had no interest in Scott, and he hated
Scotsmen as only a Welshman can hate, but he had got into
the habit. He fell asleep over the Talisman in the afternoon,
and after ten he would take down Quentin Durward and start
half-way through. Was he curious to peep furtively into that
mysterious world of mushy heroics in which he had no part?
Did he believe after all in anything beyond his propeller? Who
can say? He would lay the book aside and clear the litter from
his settee, and wait for the Old Man to speak.

" Pretty fair run," the Old Man would say, and Mr. Hopkins,
reaching for his pipe, would nod.

" Wednesday morning, I should say, eh, at two hundred and
fifty a day?"

Another nod. "How's things going? All right?"

Another nod, and silence. And then the Old Man's eyes
would move around the room, as though he had never seen it
before. He would look at the bookshelf stuffed with dime-
novels and Scott, built solid with magazines and a copy of
Breakdowns at Sea. A photograph of Mrs. Hopkins, taken some
years back, in a widespreading skirt and with her sharp eyes
cast down on the pages of a book, was fastened in brass clips
over the bunk. Other photographs there were, groups of em-
barrassed men in uniform, with backgrounds of ventilators and
life-buoys, faded portraits of old ladies and gentlemen. Colour-
prints there were too, gaudy trashy things with sentimental
rhymes tagged to them, picture post-cards of quite indescribable
bathos. Mr. Hopkins would sit, his head on his hand, listening
to the steady drum of the engines. He had no opinion of his
wall decorations; they did as well as anything. Once he had
gone over the side, his watch in his pocket and his certificate in a
Hm case in his teeth, and from the lifeboat, lifting to the eaTly

376 CASUALS OF THE SEA

morning swell, had peered through a thin fog at the steamer
that settled slowly by the head and finally vanished. He thought
nothing of it. It was, he would have told you, nothing. The
idea of using such an incident to make conversation was gro-
tesque. Captain Briscoe, desirous of being communicative, would
have felt no interest in such a commonplace triviality. He him-
self had spent three days of his life on a raft, equipped with a
most inadequate supply of provisions, so inadequate in fact that
two out of his three companions, somewhat run down by the
fine weather and the tropical sun, went to sleep and never woke
up. The minds of such men are like locked chambers of horrors
of which the keys have been lost. Mr. Hopkins gave one the
idea at times that he was looking for the key, that he was trying
to think where he had seen it last. Perhaps that was the reason
that he read Scott. As the Old Man's eye moved restlessly
round, he would fill his pipe and reach out with incredible deliber-
ation for the matches.

" She's a comfortable ship, this," the Old Man would say.

" Ah, I've seen worse," Mr. Hopkins would mutter between
the puffs, and he would hold the match interminably over the
ash tray, and letting it drop at last as though it was his life,
and he was weary of it.

" You've been here a good while now ? "

Mr. Hopkins nodded.

" How'd you get on with old Middleton ? "

" Not so bad."

" Used to carry his wife, didn't he ? "

A nod.

"All the time?"

" Mostly."

" I wish I'd brought Mrs. Briscoe now. She'll be lonely all
this time."

Only five days out! There was a shade of expression in Mr.
Hopkins' face, an expression of contempt.

" Oh, I mean, you know, the voyage ? Oil's way up now, you
know, Chief. It's all on the cards we take case-oil out of New
York to Japan, eh? They told me so in Billiter Lane."

" A year perhaps, that's nothing."

" It's some waiting when you're a married man, I think. I
wish I'd brought her with me."

"Why didn't you?"

CASUALS OF THE SEA 377

" She didn't like the idea — said she'd had enough . . ." The
Old Man stopped, pulled himself up short; you could almost
hear the brakes screaming. " She's a bad sailor. Even cross-
ing the Channel's too much for her, she says. She travelled a
good deal," he ended lamely, looking at the end of his cigar. Mr.
Hopkins, on this occasion, made no remark. His poise was ad-
mirable.

" I suppose a man gets used to it/' the Old Man added.
"In time, eh?"

Appealed to directly, the Chief allowed his eyes to travel to
Captain Briscoe's knees. Perhaps the question struck a chord
within him. Perhaps his imagination was fired by the counter-
idea of a man actually not getting used to it. He was stirred.
He became, comparatively speaking, dramatic. He shrugged
his shoulders and reached for another match.

" Got to," he whispered.

XVI

IT was a pleasant life, trading the wide world round, and
the scenes came so rapidly before him that Hannibal felt
the need of a readjustment in his mental process. No
longer was it possible (and the change from mess-room
to forecastle made the process imperative) to brood over the
rich phantasmagoria of sea-life as he had brooded over the
easy monotony of youth. When you are going to and fro across
the Seven Seas, carrying coal to the Islands, loading oil in the
West, taking sugar from Java to Germany, and salt from Ger-
many to New York, your attitude towards the eternal verities
becomes strained. You begin to understand the men about you,
why they say continually that these things are nothing, and
revolve on your own pivot. The ship takes on an importance
you could not conceive before: her very vilenesses are dear to
you. You become a part of her. You hear, in the night watches,
her voice as she labours onward, the little intimate complaints
of her fabric. And then, when in the forecastle you hear the
incredible clangours of the chain-locker as the anchor plunges
headlong to the mud of the harbour, it is to you more than
the fall of empires, and the first look through the port is like
the discovery of a new world.

So he changed, this young man from London, and into his
eyes came the look of those who have seen the great distances.
He grew lean and wiry and tanned, and a small black moustache,
like a charcoal smear, came into being on his upper lip. The
refinements of urban life, such as he had, fell from him, and
his speech became supple with the lingua franca of the sea.
He took his meals seated on a soap box, with the platters on
his knee, and he learned the wisdom of eating from the middle
of the kid, where a man's thumb cannot reach. He became,
as is necessary in the forecastle, primeval, contracting his visible
personality to a canvas bag and the boards on which he slept.
Day and night disappeared from his view and he judged men
and things by the middle- watch. Each night and noon he took

378

CASUALS OF THE SEA 379

his way along the fore-deck, under the stars or beneath a furnace
sky, and descended into his appointed place. Here again were
conditions astonishingly inimical to the conventions of the " Lit-
tle Brown Box." He never forgot his first day, leaving sunny
Las Palmas, in the bunkers. The Second had taken him down
through the stokehold, where men stabbed furiously at burned-
down fires, and great heaps of glowing clinker spattered and
stank as water was flung over them, through a small door and
up, up into blackness and pungent odours to where small yellow
flames burned smokily in the fog of a coal slide. He saw
yawning openings in the decks into which he was to tumble bar-
row after barrow, openings into which he nearly tumbled himself
once or twice. And he had been left there, with instructions
to get a move on and keep it running. He had set to work in
feverish fashion, shedding first the blue dungaree coat, then the
shirt, and finally, stripped to the skin, shovelling, shovelling,
eyes, and nose and mouth full of the acrid impalpable dust and
the sweat making rivulets of white skin on his chest. He had
gone at it bald-headed at first, after the manner of the tyro, and
at two o'clock lay panting on the coal, too exhausted to climb up
or down. The Second, crawling cat-like over the hummocks,
found him and diagnosed the disease. " You won't last a week
if you slog at it like that, man," he had said, his eyes gleaming
in his soot-darkened face. " Take it steady, pitch-and-pitch.
Like this," and taking the great square-mouthed shovel he drove
it deep into the coal, swung it back and out with a long measured
lunge and shot the mass, clean and solid, into the hole ten feet
beyond. Hannibal watched him attentively, saw the sense of
slow-moving persistence, and tried again. He got into the way
of it in a day or two, and kept her running easily enough. And
when the agonising stiffness of biceps and thighs had worn away
he even enjoyed it. It was fierce, but it was nearer being a
man than anything he had ever experienced before. At first he
had regretted the flesh-pots, and sighed on Thursday for the
ham-and-eggs of the mess-room, but he soon discovered that the
most important part of a meal was the pipe that followed. He
had discarded his short stumpy briar, and divided his affections
between a thick clay and a thin-stemmed corncob. He learned
to cut up the sweet Boreen, paring it into his hand, rolling it
with a slow circular motion, and packing it away skilfully into
the bowl, wasting none of it. He would take his corncob up on

380 CASUALS OF THE SEA

the forecastle head after tea, which was his favourite time, and
with his back against the windlass drum look out from under the
low awning at the opal and turquoise of sea and sky. It was
quiet up there, and he discovered the sense of separation that
this gives, far away from the immediate tumult of the engine-
room. Even in the bunkers he heard them but faintly, muffled
throbs mingling with the scroop and rattle of the shovel, the
croon of the dry barrow wheel, or the thunder of heavy lumps
against the bulkheads. Up there he would sit and sometimes
watch for Tommy. Half-way up the foremast was the crow's-
nest, and after tea, if it was his watch, Tommy would climb
up to the ladder and ensconce himself there for an hour, peer-
ing out across the level floors. Sometimes he would look down
and grin at the sedate Hannibal puffing luxuriously under the
awning. It was in this way that Hannibal learned the begin-
ning of a story that had its ending the day before they reached
Japan. The brown-bearded man with the bloodshot blue eyes
who trimmed on the four-to-eight watch, and who slept in the
bunk over Hannibal's, used to join him at eight bells, and sweep-
ing the kid clean with a crust, discourse upon life as he had
found it. He was bitter concerning life, apparently, blaming it
for many things, and bitterer concerning women. It was diffi-
cult to discover exactly what his grievance against them was,
for from his own telling they had been kind to him in a casual
way, helping him in divers trouble, giving him money, and asking
naught but love in return. He was very proud of his power over
women. They would do anything for him, he said. It was
possible, for women are foolish, and he had the mobile mouth
and unabashed eye that lures them to folly. And yet he spoke
of them with bitterness. They were all no good, except one,
and she was dead. Perhaps this was his grievance. She had
died while he was away, and her mother, the old hag! had de-
manded money to keep the child. That was years ago, when
he was young, and might have settled down. He had had every
intention of settling down if she had only lived. Of course, he
only told his own side of the story. He said nothing of his
desertion of the woman. How was he to know she would have
a child? And he never had any money, it seemed to go some-
how. But he had been thinking, and he was going to make a
change; he was going to save this trip's money, not get drunk
at all, go back to Amsterdam and get a boatman's job. He would

CASUALS OF THE SEA 381

put ten pounds in the bank at least, and buy a boat and some
clothes with the rest. Sailormen were fools, he argued.

Hannibal would listen and nod, letting the brown-bearded
man go on, and in this way they grew friendly, exchanging
tobacco and matches, pooling things like butter and tea, and
doing little kindnesses to one another. They shared the bucket
that the Second had given Hannibal, and took turns in washing
clothes on the fore-hatch. Little as there is to steal in a fore-
castle, men will steal it, and these two would guard each other's
tiny belongings in the watch below, taking one another's part
in the wrangle over the tinned milk, and so cultivating a certain
humanity that makes for the soul's good. It was Jan who took
Hannibal ashore in New York, when they were loading there,
and led him across the Brooklyn Bridge into the unimaginable
uproar of Manhattan. Hannibal's breath stopped as he stood
there, that Saturday afternoon, among the tangle of iron rods
and flying trolley cars, and looked out at New York. It was to
his unaccustomed eyes the City of a Dream. He walked through
the deep streets, a pigmy among pigmies, dazed and frightened.
The roar of it, and the immensity of it, appalled him. But
when they walked down to the Battery and saw the great ferries
sliding back and forth like shuttles on the bright water, saw
the blue sea shimmering beyond, he felt reassured. Jan laughed
and said it was nothing. He had worked there once for a time,
got four dollars a day until he went on the booze and lost his
job. It had not been his fault. Some one had put knock-out
drops in his liquor and cleaned him up while he was unconscious.
All his money gone, he had shipped away again on a German
ship, and tried to start afresh. But Hannibal's gaze returned
again and again to the tremendous buildings with their innumer-
able windows, tier on tier to the sky, their giant towers and stark
outlines. It seemed to him that there was a personal antagonism
in this monstrous conglomeration of alien energy, and he felt
afraid. What would they think of it at home? How would
Mr. Grober regard it? It did not occur to him that he might
find Mr. Grobers in New York as in London. It seemed im-
possible. This was a place for men who had leaped the quick-
sands of life, who were not to be sucked in like Mr. Grober.
And yet as his eyes took in the more immediate details, he saw
old men and slatternly women on the seats around them dozing
in the heat, very like people on seats at home. It was when

382 CASUALS OF THE SEA

they boarded a surface-car and went away uptown that he saw
a difference. There was a brisk, unrelenting hardness in the
faces, a ceaseless striving after smartness in the clothing, a dis-
quieting lack of humanity in the way the conductor pushed an
old man off the step, that seemed in keeping with those prodig-
ious structures among which they crept. Hannibal's uneasiness
deepened. The atmosphere was charged with unrest. The
brown-bearded man and his young companion in their rough and
crinkled clothes seemed out of place. They got off and walked
along aimlessly, suddenly tired. Hannibal felt that he was not
equal to it. He wanted to get back to the ship. He remembered
that he ought to write a letter.

So he saw the world in fugitive peeps, and began to com-
prehend why seamen in the fulness of their knowledge called
it nothing. He felt that too; all those millions of people hurry-
ing to and fro were nothing to him. He was but an alien, a
haphazard atom of humanity dropped among them for an idle
hour. A day or two, and he was on the sea again. He preferred
it that way. As the weeks grew into months he became aware
of a fuller and more passionate love of it. The cool wind at
evening, when he sat by the windlass and thought of Nellie; the
endlessly changing panorama of clouds, the sublime galaxies of
the tropic sky, the friendly moon flooding the wide ocean with
silver light, the lonely tramp passing a mile away — all these
things touched him and filled his heart with peace.

He had had no letter yet from her, he remembered, as they
drove southward toward the Cape. Of course, it was a difficult
job to time a letter properly to catch a ship that was wandering
hither and thither. Plenty of other men on the ship had missed
letters they were sure had been mailed. Perhaps he would get
one in Durban. He tried to feel worried but he did not succeed.
He longed for the time when he would return, and yet he was
very happy as he was. He liked it, this life of strenuous toil.
He liked the monotony of it. It gave him time to think about
things. He acquired a sort of spiritual stoicism often cultivated
at sea. It is the ultimate good to be derived from the sea by
those who dwell in the hot, unhealthy huddle of towns. In there
among those roadways, in the clashing din of the market and
the bawl of the money-changers, you cannot see mankind for the
people, you cannot feel for your nerves. At sea, you behold the
ignoble rabble in perspective, the blatk many-headed swarm lie

CASUALS OF THE SEA 388

on the fair earth like a blight, you perceive the contemptible
insignificance of their passions in comparison with the terrible
passion of the sea, and if you have been living " according to
your lights," you will have time and space to see the lights of
eternity, to listen to the west wind, and to harken to the voice
of the storm.

He had too much to reflect upon to become morbidly interested
in himself. No man can be an egoist in the forecastle. The
lack of privacy and the communal discipline of toil precludes
it. When the Caryatid pushed her blunt nose across the thirtieth
parallel, and the cool rushing trade-wind poured down the ven-
tilators and flapped the shirts bent to the forecastle rails, Han-
nibal would sit amongst his mates and listen to their vague
maundering speech. They were scarcely to be called men, if
you selected, say, Sir Anthony Gilfillan as a typical man.
Rather were they dumb-driven cattle, capable nevertheless of
turning, the red light of battle in the dull eye, and rushing upon
their owners. They did this once — and it may happen again.

For the most they slept or read penny stories of true love
and virtue triumphant. There were twelve of them there in
that dark triangular cupboard. Three small ports admitted a
dim twilight upon them as they sat about on boxes or lolled in
their bunks. At night a single bulb of light behind a ground-
glass screen burned like a relentless eye watching them. When
they moved, vast shadows swept across bulkhead and ceiling
with idiotic speed. Men hung pants and towels over their rails
to obscure the light, while others read. Fritz, the German
greaser, had fashioned a hinged tin box to cover it in the night-
watches, and this box had a habit of working loose from its hook
and, coming down with a bang in the middle of a desultory con-
versation, plunge them in darkness. The floor was littered with
matches and soiled with black boot-tracks. Here and there
some one had laid down a piece of sacking in an attempt to keep
the place tidy. One or two bunks were neat and clean. Often
you might see a half-naked figure rubbing with sweat-rag and
soap at some unpremeditated soilure on his bunk-board, the
petty motions of his arm repeated in gigantic grotesque across the
wall. But these were exceptions. The great Greek, whose feet
hung over the bunk-board near the door and tended to obtrude
upon the incoming stranger, terrifying him with their very vast-
ness, blackness, and sprawling articulation, was not a clean man.

384 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Hannibal would sit on his box and look up at this recumbent
enigma, wondering what he thought about. It was his duty
twice a day, at four o'clock, to arouse the man. Once — the
day they left New York, to be precise — he had been unable to
arouse him. Pinching, punching, shouting into the sooty orifice
of his ear, was of no avail. Hannibal called the Second Engi-
neer, and received some instruction in the art of turning out
the watch. The Second placed his oil-smooth hands on the
Greek's enormous abdomen and rolled him slowly from side to
side. If you have a nervous temperament this will cause you to
sit up, knocking your head against the bulb-iron of the ceiling,
and shrieking with simple terror. But the Greek was fathoms
deep in an aftermath of carouse, and he only sighed, flinging
one great arm over his head. He lay there in magnificent pose
for a sculptor, the eccentricities of the lighting throwing his
profile into sharp relief. The Second was not a sculptor, and
he merely scratched his hand and cast his eyes down at the
bottom bunk. A tow-haired Norwegian lay there, wide-eyed,
watching him. The Second crooked his finger. " Get out," he
said shortly. The man came obediently, feet first, hitching his
grey flannel underclothes as he stood up. The Second got into
the bunk, lay down and put his feet against the loose boards of
the top bunk. What followed was almost too rapid for Han-
nibal to take in. The body of the Greek rose as though in some
terrible physical convulsion, swayed, and fell over the board,
belly first, clothes, mattress and all, in one tumultuous cascade
upon the floor. Hannibal and the Norwegian stepped back to
avoid the crash. For a moment the malodorous heap lay still.
A man putting on his boots on the other side of the room mut-
tered, " Jesus Christ ! " rose up and slouched away on deck.
Slowly the Greek raised himself to his knees, coughed and spat,
the saliva dribbling in discoloured threads from his lips. He
looked round as an ox looks round in the pen, suspicious, bewil-
dered, the whites of his eyes rolling.

" Goin' to turn to ? " asked the Second.

Once again the man spat, and struggled to his feet blindly.

" Serve you right," said the Second, looking down at the dis-
array of the bedding. " Too much whisky, Angelatos. Get busy
now ! There you are ! "

High up in the crow's-nest the bell tanged sharply, eight
strokes.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 385

And Hannibal went down to wash himself in the stokehold.

It was somewhere in that interminable crawl across the Indian
Ocean from Durban to Sabang that he got his first taste of
the fever that seizes the Northerner by way of carelessness.
Day after day they followed the long slant north-easterly, cross-
ing the burning line at an angle of twenty degrees. Day after
day the sun blazed down upon them, and night followed night
in breathless succession. And then one evening there came a
change. The light air that Hannibal sought so eagerly after
tea on the forecastle-head, dropped entirely, the black smoke of
the Natal coal rose in a spectral column from the funnel-top.
Up on the bridge the white figures of the Captain and Mate
showed against the teak wheel-house where they talked. Out
of the ship's side a great tin wind-scoop could be seen sticking
from the Steward's room, twisting round and round as he en-
deavoured vainly to catch the slightest draught. Late into the
first watch Hannibal lay up there winking at the stars, turning
in hot discomfort on his pallet, and watching a black line thicken
and spread over the horizon. As the hours crept past it grew,
a dense blackness like a smudge of charcoal on dark blue paper.
When he was called at One Bell the blue dome was blotted out,
and he had to feel his way to the ladder. It was about half-
past one, as he stood under the ventilator in the stokehold drip-
ping with sweat after cleaning the ashpits, that he heard the thin
clear call of the Chief's whistle. As he climbed the ladders a
heavy blob of warm greasy rain smote his cheek, another fell on
his hand. The Chief, ghostly in his white sleeping-suit, was
standing by the fiddle-top.

"Yessir?" asked Hannibal.

" It's goin' to be some shower," muttered the Chief, taking
hold of his arm and pointing to the skylights. " Better get up
and shut 'em. Turn the ventilators aft. Quick ! "

Hannibal climbed quickly, but the rein was quicker. As he
thrust the first skylight lift hard down, it came. Each great
drop, as it struck his vest and pants, seemed to pin it to his
body. He bowed his head to shield his eyes, and the rain
poured down his neck in streams. The sound of it battering
on the awnings and canvas covers of the lifeboats was deafening.
He had to feel for each lift as he struggled round. He could
see the Third, far down in the glittering radiance of the engine-
room, looking up, wondering at the noise. In less than half a

386 CASUALS OF THE SEA

minute Hannibal was as wet as though he had been dipped in
the sea. His boots were full, his pants clung to his limbs, and
the rain ran from his hair into his eyes. He jumped down to
the deck, felt for the rope ladder that was lashed in the bunker
hatch, and disappeared, swaying, into the deeper darkness of
the coal. Anywhere to get out of the rain!

" Gor lummy ! " he muttered to himself, crouching on the
coal, and wondering how long it would last. And as he sat
there he began to shiver. He tore off his singlet and tried to
wipe his body with his sweat-rag. He stripped and went on
wiping, his teeth chattering. He hardly knew what to do.
All his dry things were in the forecastle. He went to the lad-
der and looked up. The breeze was cooler now, a tear in the
black canopy showed a strip of velvet blue sky studded with
stars. He decided to chance it before it came on again, and
climbing up, he ran swiftly forward, his white body gleaming in
the darkness. He found a dry cotton vest and clean dungarees
and put them on. Certainly it had been " some shower."

The next morning, when they called him for his breakfast,
he lay on, shivering with cold and streaming with sweat. His
stomach seemed tied into knots. The Second came along and
looked at him, scratching his head. When he asked what was
the matter, Hannibal turned over in utter weariness and said
he was sick. There was something wrong with his inside. The
Second went away and the Steward came, bringing the simple
therapeutics of the sea. He put a slim glass tube in Hannibal's
mouth and told him to keep it there for a minute. When the
Steward took the thermometer out again and looked at the tem-
perature he said " Sufferm' Moses ! " and ran away to speak to
the Old Man. They returned together, white figures over-
whelmingly incongruous in the dim kennel. Captain Briscoe
looked down at the youth lying motionless under the blanket.
You would not have thought, to look at the Captain's immaculate
drill suit with the gold shoulder-straps, the white-covered cap
with its ornate badge and cord, his neatly-trimmed beard, his
pipe-clayed shoes, that he had lived many years in the fore-
castles of sailing-ships. He stood looking down, his hands
clasped behind him, while the Steward tried the temperature
again.

" Hundred and one — hundred and two, now, sir ! Better
give him the fever-mixture, I should think."

CASUALS OF THE SEA S87

" And a dose of salts/ added the Captain. " What's his
name ? " he asked generally.

Nobody knew his name. Jan, lying in his bunk, leaned over
and looked down at the young man.

" Hanny, what's your name?" he called. "Captain wants
to know your name."

" Gooderich, sir," he whispered, and the Captain gave a
scarcely perceptible start.

" What's he been doing? "

" In the rain, I expect, last night," said the Steward. " I
felt it on me face. Had to shut the port, sir."

The Captain went out into the daylight and walked up and
down the bridge for an hour, pulling at his beard. Mr. Cadox-
ton, in exceedingly fine raiment which he had got, at great
expense, from a Liverpool tailor, surveyed the ocean with a sat-
isfied smile. He was a nice-looking lad, with a complexion tend-
ing to ruddiness and freckles beneath the eyes. His teeth were
white and regular and he used a manicure set. Captain Briscoe
had not made up his mind about Mr. Cadoxton. Finding him
playing cards one evening in the dog-watch, he had remarked
that he would be better employed studying for his Master's ticket.
This was excellent in its way, only Mr. Cadoxton, who was a
little older than his clean-shaven and fresh-looking features be-
tokened, already possessed an extra-master's certificate, and Cap-
tain Briscoe should have found it out before. He knew, and
he knew that Mr. Cadoxton knew, that he himself would never
get an extra-master's certificate if he lived to be a thousand
years old. Mr. Cadoxton looked down even on " Conway boys."
As he stepped jauntily to and fro, keeping his eyes with exas-
perating vigilance upon the empty horizon, Captain Briscoe,
walking fore and aft alongside the wheel-house, reflected with
some bitterness upon the puzzling tangle of existence. He
would have given fifty pounds for some one to talk to. He
dared not open his mouth to the Mate, the man's every movement
implied his unappeasable hunger for promotion. The Second
Mate was fat and secretive, and his record was clouded by that
grotesque bigamy charge. With the curious contrariness of hu-
man proclivities, Captain Briscoe desired greatly the confidence
of Mr. Cadoxton. He felt that the young man had the inde-
finable requisites of gentility; his voice betrayed him when he
spoke of " my people." Captain Briscoe, with an effort, remem-

388 CASUALS OF THE SEA

bered to lay his knife and fork together before the Steward
removed the plate. Mr. Cadoxton did it without remembering,
just as he took his soup from the further edge. Captain Briscoe
had every reason to hate the young man, and did hate him at
times, and yet he felt that if only they could gain one another's
confidence in some trivial accidental way, he might derive com-
fort from the circumstance. They approached each other auto-
matically in their walk, and Mr. Cadoxton withdrew his eyes
from the ocean.

" The Steward tells me there's a trimmer sick, sir," he re-
marked in his small refined voice.

" A touch of fever," assented Captain Briscoe. " It's a very
curious coincidence," he went on, " that young feller's name is
the same as my wife's."

" Is that so, sir ? It is curious, certainly. We all have poor
relations somewhere."

Captain Briscoe thought this an excellent notion, and dem-
ocratic.

" A matter we can't be held responsible for," he suggested.

" Of course. It may be only a coincidence though : I have
heard the name before. That's the chap who was in the mess-
room, I think."

" That's him."

" Very decent young chap, sir. I spoke to him about the boat-
drill last Saturday and he was very civil. Most unusual in the
firemen class."

" I can't say," said the Old Man — " I can't say as I'd like
to have anybody belonging to me in the forecastle, nowadays.
Still, I don't know anything against it, if the man's respect-
able."

" Not at all. A man isn't responsible for the others. But
why don't you ask him, sir? Has Mrs. Briscoe mentioned any
of her relations who follow the sea ? "

" No," said the Captain, taking out a cigar. " She didn't."

" Perhaps he's one of the independent sort, quarrelled with
his people, perhaps."

"Maybe. What is it, Chief?"

The Chief, in his suit of blotched khaki with the brass but-
tons enamelled with verdigris, stood looking up at them. He
pointed to the forecastle.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 389

" Oh, he'll be all right to-morrow, Chief. Put 'em on six-
hour watches," and the Chief walked slowly back to the after-
deck.

"You think he's quarrelled, eh?"

" I had a cousin who went to Canada," remarked Mr. Cadox-
ton, reaching for the binoculars in the box by the telegraph.
" And I believe he did something of the sort. Left the Army
and went out for good."

" Fireman? " asked the Captain hopefully.

" Oh, much worse, sir. I believe he's a billiard-marker in a
club."

Captain Briscoe resumed his walk. The long voyage was tell-
ing on his nerves. Fifty days out, and still they crawled in an
unbroken circle of cobalt blue. They were making, according
to orders, for Sabang, a new coaling station somewhere in the
north of Sumatra. This was the second time they had crossed
the line. Twice more they would have to pass that mystic
circle ere they started northward up the China Sea. He reflected
with impatience upon the absurd regulations of the Canal which
made case-oil prohibitive if carried on that route. In Sabang he
would get coal and fresh meat, and what was more important,
letters. He had had a letter in Durban, a brief scribble with-
out any of the luxuriant language of newly-wedded lo,ve and
therefore unsatisfying. She said she was busy with her flat,
had joined a women's club, would write more next time. He
could not help being proud of the stylish handwriting, the em-
bossed lettering of the address, the thick square envelope. She
knew how to do things all right. But he longed for a little
gush. Was it anyway possible she disliked being called his own
dear darling little wife? A warm flush of vexation came over
his face, and he went down to get a peg of whisky.

Two or three days of breathless inaction and semi-starvation,
racked by diarrhoea and headache, and Hannibal crawled out
into the daylight again. The Second told him to take it easy,
and gave him a stiff dose of whisky. It did him good, though
he found the shovel strangely heavy, and often he would grow
dizzy and have to lie on the hatch with his face on his arm,
exhausted. Swansea seemed a long way off. Was she thinking
of him? He hoped so. He found now, in his weakness, that
tears came easily. He was sorry for himself. And one night

890 CASUALS OF THE SEA

as he sat in the cool breeze that blew from the Nicobars, he
heard the mates and engineers in the Second Mate's room sing-
ing " Rolling Home " : —

Rollin' home, rollin' home,
Rollin' home, rollin' home,

Rollin' home — across — the sea.
Rollin' home to dear old England,

Rollin' home — dear heart — to thee!

He felt a terrible pain in his chest, and the tears came unbid-
den to his eyes. He heard a growl from some one of them,
overwrought.

" For the Lord's sake sing something else ! I can't stand
it ! " And Hannibal understood perfectly.

Twenty-eight days after they had quitted Durban, the Caryatid,
rounding Acheen Head, passed slowly into the land-locked har-
bour of Sabang and made fast to the white timbers of the jetty.
Angelatos went to the door of the forecastle as the Mate shouted,
" Make fast ! " and looked round, licking his lips. He had been
this way before, had Angelatos, and he knew that gin was a
shilling a bottle.

XVII

IT was the end of the day, and the Caryatid lay off in the
middle of the land-locked harbour. From where Captain
Briscoe sat in his deck-chair no break could be distinguished
in the high, densely-wooded hills that enclosed the sheet
of waveless water in which he laid moored. It was as though
some mad millionaire had brought a great ship over the moun-
tains and launched her on his ornamental lake. Here and there
in the velvety gloom a light hung, a drop of liquid yellow. The
riding light shed a pale glare on the forward awnings. For the
rest, it was darkness save for the dim light of the stars. The
oil-lamps in the chart-house failed to penetrate the curtains.
Captain Briscoe, in his pyjamas, his pipe gone out, lay in his
deck-chair and stared out moodily towards the bows. He was
distraught in more ways than one. The owners had cabled, coun-
selling speed, and he had cabled back diplomatically, regretting
a non-existent delay. That was bad, on his first voyage in a
bigger ship. What was worse, he had received another brief
letter from Minnie. She was busy and could not think of a
great deal to tell him. Throwing down the letter petulantly he
had torn open the newspaper, one of those bulky weekly journals
that appeal more particularly to the love of the dramatic and
spectacular in human beings. On the front sheet was an article
with big headlines relating the successful and burglarious entry
of some suffragettes into the House of Commons. Captain Bris-
coe regarded the suffragettes very much as he regarded Dagos,
with loathing and contempt. He felt they ought to be crushed
with an iron hand. If, he argued, a woman was a woman, she
would never do the things these hermaphrodite beings did so
persistently and publicly. Mr. Cadoxton had agreed with him
in this. He read on, trying to interest himself in the paper,
when he came to the list of the prisoners who had been hand-
cuffed after a stiff struggle with the police. With something
like paralysis numbing his brain, he had seen Minnie Briscoe on
the printed page, and had let the paper drop.

At tea-time he had sat there at the head of the cabin-table,

391

392 CASUALS OF THE SEA

seeing nothing, eating nothing. With a certain sense of relief
he saw that Mr. Cadoxton was absent, taking watch on deck.
What was he to do? He wanted to run away and hide him-
self. He felt that if he could only go out and kill something
it would ease the agony of mind. They would all see it.
Every one would have a look at the papers. He had a wild
notion of going round and stealing them from the different rooms.
He turned again and again, when he reached his room, to the
vile rag that had recorded this hateful thing. There it was,
" Minnie Briscoe, 303 Tedworth Square, S.W." She, his wife,
was in prison!

So far, he reflected as he sat in his chair, sucking at a cold
pipe, so far, thank God, he had seen no hint of any suspicion in
the faces of the others. But to-morrow, and the days to come!
His hands clutched as he thought of it. And on top of this,
the trouble with the men. Gin was a shilling a bottle in this
place, and somehow, in spite of his care, they had got it. The
Chief had told him laconically that steam was impossible until
the men came round. They lay in an abysmal stupor; nothing
could be done. Only one, that young chap out of the mess-room,
was doing his best with the Third and Fourth to clean one or
two fires during the night. Captain Briscoe thought bitterly
that he need have no cause to look down on the young man now
— he was at least respectable. He rose from his chair and went
down the ladder, leaving the Third Mate leaning over the rail.
Hannibal stood by the fiddle-grating, cooling himself after a
turn with the shovel. He felt rather uplifted by the fact that
he was the only fireman sober. It had been a wild time in the
forecastle that afternoon. Men had drunk themselves mad.
Angelatos had grown furious with a big red-haired Liverpool
Irishman, had lunged forward with a bottle in his hand and gone
down with a crash against the bulkhead. Jan was drunk too,
and it took a lot of gin to make him drunk. Hannibal saw the
Old Man pass into the cabin, and went over to the hatch to sit
down. The Fourth would call him if he wanted him. He had
had a letter from Nellie, a real letter, full of cheery gossip from
his own love-a-duck. Another from his mother did not contain
much news. Mrs. Gooderich had not felt able to explain what
had happened to Minnie. When you come to think of it, it was
rather a difficult thing to explain to a boy, as Mrs. Gooderich
still thought him to be. As he sat there thinking of all that

CASUALS OF THE SEA 393

had happened since he had left the Little Brown Box, he became
aware of two crouching figures moving across the dim whiteness
of the cabin bulkhead. They paused at the entry, gesticulating
in the darkness. Perhaps they wanted the Steward. He didn't
know. Why should he bother? He had plenty to do. And as
he was asking himself why he should bother, he heard a thud,
and a growl.

He rose up and went on tiptoe to the cabin door. At the far
end of the white panelled alley-way was a swaying curtain. He
heard a struggling sound, and a smothered " Ouch " and an
imprecation. He went in feeling his way along the wall, leaving
black finger-marks on the glossy enamel, and drew the curtain.

It was the Captain's room. The oil-lamp was turned down
low by the broad bunk. Across the room, just in front of a
mahogany locker, were three men locked together. Captain
Briscoe's sleeping suit showed up against the dark forms of the
other two, who were on their knees in a curiously bowed attitude.
His arms were about their necks, and he was striving to crush
them down. One of them had worked his arm loose, and wrapped
it around the Captain's neck. So they strove there, almost in
silence, rocking to and fro.

The sound of the Third Mate's footsteps in the ladder roused
Hannibal to action. He turned and beckoned, and then ran in
and seized the fireman's arms. Mr. Cadoxton followed him pre-
cipitately. He had been dozing and dreaming of the pleasant
Leicestershire country, when he heard the first thump below
him.

"What's up, sir?" he called, and threw himself upon the
man's neck. Freed from the embrace the Old Man sprang to
his feet and dealt the man blow after blow in the neck and
face. For an instant he was mad, and struck blindly, but the
Third Mate's voice recalled him. He paused.

" Get the handcuffs," he ordered briefly. " And call the
Mate." The men rose to their feet, cowed and noiseless. Han-
nibal saw with amazement that one of them was Jan.

The Mate came hurrying in with the shining steel things in
his hands. Captain Briscoe turned up the lamp. He seemed
relieved by the exertion. His face was calm as he turned to the
men.

" Mr. Hutchins," he said to the Mate, " handcuff these men
and put them in the lazaret. In the morning I log them for

394 CASUALS OF THE SEA

breaking into the spirit-locker. Mr. Cadoxton, you're a witness
of this. You!" he said to Hannibal. "You saw this, eh?"

" Yes, sir, I heard a noise as I was sitting on the hatch."

" Take them out of it," ordered the Captain. " And call the
Steward to put the place straight."

To Hannibal, standing in that unaccustomed privacy, there
was something horrible in the submissively extended wrists of
the two men who had been bludgeoned into a craven acceptance
of manacled seclusion. And one of them was Jan, the man he
had been ashore with, his chum in a way, and not a bad fellow at
all. As the Mate led the men away and Mr. Cadoxton followed,
he remained standing on the soft red carpet. The Captain
turned and saw him. Checking a gesture of dismissal he looked
the young man over.

" See what it does for a man ! " he remarked, feeling for a
bruise near his eye. " Keep away from it."

" I do, sir. Never take much. Makes me 'ead ache."

" Good for you. What's your name ? "

" Gooderich."

"Oh." The Captain went over to a little mahogany table
and took a fountain pen and paper. " You belong to London ? "

" Yes, sir."

" Any relations there ? "

" Yes, mother and sister."

"Sister, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

There was a pause. Hannibal's eyes came away from the
table and met the Captain's squarely. The Captain went over
and took the door off the hook. The Steward came in with a
run as the Captain was closing it.

" Never mind, Steward," he said. " Clean it up in the morn-
ing. I've changed my mind." And he shut the door.

" Now," he said. " You did me a good turn coming in here
just now."

" It was the Third Mate, sir."

" Yes, you did, and I'm going to do you a bad turn in pay-
ment for it. Don't you know anything about your sister at
all?"

" Just a bit, sir. We never 'ad much truck with each other
since I was a kid."

"You know, then?"

CASUALS OF THE SEA 395

" Something, sir."

" You know what she used to be — when I first knew her? "

Hannibal looked down, his hands behind him, vaguely dis-
turbed.

" I didn't," he muttered at length. " But I can make a pretty
good guess."

M And do you know where she is now ? "

" Married, sir."

" She's my wife ! "

" That's right, sir."

" And do you know what she's done since we left home? "

"I — I haven't 'eard, sir. My mother don't say much about
'cr. She's almost a stranger to me," he pleaded in a low voice.

" Look here ! " And Captain Briscoe held up the newspaper.
" She's in jail. My wife and your sister in jail. That's a nice
thing to have coming after fifty-six days at sea." Holding the
paper to the light Hannibal read the particulars of the raid
and the ensuing arraignments.

*' A nice thing!" muttered the Captain, feeling the bruise
swelling beneath his eye.

" And then this on top of it. My God ! "

He turned, and putting up his hands on either side of the
port, looked out. A black mark ran across his shoulders where
the man's arm had laid hold of him.

Hannibal put the paper down and looked round in a scared
way. The moment was beyond him. He couldn't express what
he felt save that he was sorry for the Old Man. This man
had been kind to him, had given him a job. He was, moreover,
his brother-in-law. That was what staggered him. All these
months they had been within a hundred feet of one another and
no words spoken. What a strange world it was! And his sis-
ter, the quiet-eyed girl who used to take him with her to the
Botany Class in Trinity Road, in jail!

" What is to be done, sir? " he asked in a low voice.

" I don't know. Upon my soul, I don't know. Only this.
Keep your mouth shut, do you hear ? "

" I ain't likely to blab," Hannibal said, surprised.

"See you when we get home, understand?"

"Yes, sir."

" You see what this means to me?" He ceased abruptly, a
look of fear coming into his eyes as though he himself were

896 CASUALS OF THE SEA

only just then seeing what it meant to him. His trim beard
was twisted around his set mouth, his pyjamas had lost a button
or two, and revealed the hairy chest, faintly tattooed with red
and green markings, a heart, hands clasped, a Union Jack.

" I won't say anything to anybody," said Hannibal. " It's
a mixed-up business, I can see that, for you."

" I'll have to cable," the Old Man muttered, staring at Han-
nibal. "What shall I cable? I must think. But it's all over
now. They'll get six months. We'll be home by then. God ! "

There came a knock at the door. It must have been low
enough, but it sounded like the crack of doom to the two stand-
ing within. The Captain went over and opened the door. The
Chief, looking as though he were deliberating upon some stu-
pendous problem, stood on the mat. He raised his eyes.

" Trouble ? " he asked, feeling in his pocket for matches.

" Oh, Chief, come in. I've been taking this man's evidence.
He came in after those two toughs and assisted me. All right,
you," he said briskly. " You'll sign the log in the morning."

Hannibal stepped out into the alley-way and the door closed.

" Trouble? " the Old Man whispered, taking the Chief's arm.
" Don't it take the biscuit ? Here we've come twenty-eight days
without a break, saving coal, as they told us, and they want to
know where we've been. And then this on top of it. This
means twelve hours lost."

" Gin's too cheap," said the Chief, putting the match care-
fully in the ash-tray. " I've been along. Fo'c'sle's like a pig-
sty. Stinks. Hell let loose. I'd jail them if I was you."

At the word jail the Old Man looked hard at the Chief, who
was staring at the wall. "Jail," he whispered, and said no
more.

" You've got a bat in the eye ? " asked the Chief, looking at
him for a moment.

" Isn't it a hell of a life ? " snarled the other, suddenly raging.
" Isn't it a beautiful life ? Here am I, lying on my bed worried
enough with one thing and another, God knows, and those scum
crawl across the room to the whisky." He tore the pyjama
jacket from his body and flung it in a corner.

"Jump on 'em?" enquired Mr. Hopkins.

" I landed right on top of them, and by God, I'd have killed
one of them if nobody'd come in. And been sorry for it ! " he

CASUALS OF THE SEA 397

added, stepping, nude and shaking with anger, to a chest of
drawers.

"All they're fit for," growled the Chief, going towards the
door.

u Hold on, wait till I get some clothes. Have a peg? It's
on the locker."

" Get any letters ? " asked the Chief, pouring some whisky
into a glass. The Captain came up to him and poured another.

" Yes," he said, drinking.

"All right at home?"

The Captain reached up for a cigar-box and selected a cheroot.
He turned the light down till it was a blue shadow in the shell
of the burner.

" So damned hot," he said huskily. *' Sit down, Chief. I've
got to tell you something, about my wife. You may hear from
some lying hobo who'll put all sorts of frills on it. I can trust
you to keep mum, can't I ? "

Mr. Hopkins, drawing steadily at his pipe, grunted and in-
clined his ear.

" The fact is," went on the Captain, " my wife's got some
peculiar ideas. She's taken up with the Suffragette business and
there's been some trouble. She got run in with a lot of others,
and there you are. You can understand of course, it's only a
case of her being led on."

" I saw it," said the Chief, staring at the carpet.

" You saw it! " repeated the Old Man, drawing back. " Then
why in thunder didn't you say so? "

" No business o' mine."

Captain Briscoe sucked at his cigar.

"They've all seen it, then?"

"No. What of it?"

" Suppose it was your wife. Think of it — handcuffed ! "

" Say nothing."

*' It's all I can say. I only told you in confidence. I've got
to speak to somebody. I'd go mad if I didn't, Chief."

" It'll pass. This business will make 'em forget it. You're
making too much of it."

A silence fell upon them, and they sat there in the dark-
ness, each thinking, in his own way, of the tremendous problems
that beset them whenever they touched the land. All real trouble

398 CASUALS OF THE SEA

came to them from ashore. Mr. Hopkins, turning over in his
mind a certain mortgage, almost regretted the necessity for receiv-
ing letters at all. Captain Briscoe sought relief from his pres-
ent disorder in reflecting upon the easy way in which sailormen
were fooled. Everybody fooled them — owners, ship-chandlers,
house-agents, charterers, women, everybody! Fooled them and
forgot them. He found himself back at the old point again.
Minnie had forgotten him, else why had she not written to him
in her trouble? He stirred uneasily on the red-plush cushion as
this new grievance flooded his mind. As though he understood,
as perhaps he did, for he understood more than he could express,
Mr. Hopkins put his hand on the Old Man's arm.

" Wait, wait," he muttered. " You're all worked up. Turn
in and sleep. You can't do anything."

He stood up, and the room filled suddenly with dazzling
radiance.

" He's got some steam," remarked Mr. Hopkins. " We'll get
away at daylight. Good night."

He went away quietly, and Captain Briscoe, turning out all
the electric lights save one by the bed, sat for a long time at
his table, his chin on his hands. Gradually the tide turned, and
a semblance of peace came into his eyes.

" No," he said to himself gently, as though in answer to a
voiceless query. " No, she's mine. I took her, knowing what
she was. Some day I'll stay ashore and look after her. A little
house in the country, with honeysuckle and bees. God! The
years I've worked! I don't ask much, eh? Just a few years,
and a few things some men have all the time. Surely she'll
understand. She's cleverer than me, she'll understand."

It was midnight when he rose, and the habit of years sent
him up on the bridge to have a last look round. The Third
and Second Mates stood in the shadow of the awning, talking
earnestly together. They fell apart as he came up.

" All right, Mr. Brail? " he asked.

" All quiet, sir." ,

" Call me at four o'clock," he ordered. " I'm going to turn
in."

" Very good, sir."

He went in again, and lying down on his bed he extinguished
the light and fell into a tumbled sleep.

XVIII

THEY had been out two days from Sabang, when Han-
nibal, hanging over the side of the starboard bunker-
hatch, discovered it. He had come up for his two o'clock
spell and a faint breeze blew off the mountains of
Sumatra and fanned his face. His body was naked to the waist,
a black sweat-rag hung like a rope's-end around his neck, and he
spat inkily into the blue water that lapped the rusty and peeling
plates. Without knowing exactly why, he found himself wait-
ing for the occasional wavelet that reached the starboard strake
and ran aft with a nicker and a scarcely perceptible hiss. He
bent his head lower and watched carefully. The next time the
slight heel of the ship aided the ripple, the immersion was
deeper, the hiss unmistakable. He got down on his knees and
felt the ship's side. Hot, yes, but not so hot as all that. There
it went again. He waited until the ship rolled to starboard
again and watched. This time he saw it for certain. It was
steam.

He stood up again and tried to think what to do. He was a
man now and he wanted to make sure. Where could he get
another view of that bunker? He went down the ladder and
saw with disappointment that he could not get to the inboard
side of it. It was too near the funnel. But the bottom of it,
he reflected, would be the ceiling of the engine-room down below,
over the forced-draught fan. He descended and passed under
the boilers into the engine-room. The Third was standing undei
the windsail, whistling: " That's how I need you."

"Hello," he said, "what's to do?"

Hannibal's eyes wandered about the ceiling over the fan and
dynamo, and the Third looked at him in some surprise.

" Say, mister," remarked the young man, raising a black arm,
" what's up above that there."

" Coal, my child. Stabbord engine-room pocket. Want
some?" But Hannibal had run three steps, and stopped, look-
ing up at the smudge on the white paint.

" Can you get up there ? " he asked. This time the Third

399

400 CASUALS OF THE SEA

saw the smudge and understood. In three springs he was on the
fan, another, and he was hanging to a stringer within the reach
of the smudge. He touched it, and withdrew his head quickly.
He dropped down beside Hannibal and took up the telephone.

" It's the Third, sir. Come down for a minute."

" Is it? " asked Hannibal.

" Stinkin'," replied the Third. " Now be a man, and say
nothing to anybody. This is a business for the Chief. What
made you come in here ? "

" Saw the sea spitting on the side, sir."

" Bully for you ! Here comes the Chief."

He came, incredibly agile for so phlegmatic a man, four steps
at a leap, swinging by the hand-rails like a monkey.

" What's to do," he asked, and the Third pointed.

" Put the Sanitary pump on deck. You go and take the
hatches off quick," he added to Hannibal.

As Hannibal knocked the wedges from the cleats and let the
battens clatter on the deck, the Captain paused in his walk on
the bridge and looked along at him. When the tarpaulins were
folded back and the hatch lifted, and he saw Hannibal fall away
from the opening, Captain Briscoe came down quickly.

" Eh? " he said, bending over and touching the coal. " What's
the matter ? "

" Chief told me to take it off, sir."

A thin lazy thread of smoke crept out from among the lumps
of fuel and blew away. The Chief came along from the engine-
room. He had relapsed into his wonted taciturnity. He looked
at the thread of smoke and searched for matches.

" Going good," he commented.

With a great slither the fire-hose was flung across the saddle-
back hatch abaft the funnel, and began to straighten out with
the urging of the water. The Chief put it into the coal.

Soon they were all there. Bosun and mates, carpenter, engi-
neers, all craning their necks to look at the hatch. The two
apprentices, painting the ice box aft, looked on from afar with
an agony of curiosity. Everybody knew it inside of five minutes.

" Who discovered it ? " asked the Captain.

" The Third told me," said Mr. Hopkins, resenting the crowd
about him.

" The trimmer noticed the ship's side was hot."

Immediately the rail was adorned with downward-looking

CASUALS OF THE SEA 401

heads. Hannibal felt self-conscious and rather glad. It is nice
to feel you are some use after all. Captain Briscoe spoke low
to the Chief.

" All right," the latter nodded. " The best way is to wet it
and try to smother it. Go down," he said to the Fourth. " Go
down and ease the pump. And tell the Third to watch his star-
board bilges."

Later in the day it became known that the fire was inex-
tinguishable. Down there in the coal somewhere the combustible
stuff had fretted into flame, and was burning with a dull solid
glow, spreading, as they could tell by the hiss of the strake
further forward and the discolouration of the ceiling in the
engine-room. Rumours passed to and fro that they would have
to stop. Mr. Cadoxton spoke of Singapore, and the Third Engi-
neer gave a touch of science to the deliberation by mentioning
spontaneous combustion. At the end of the day Singapore had
become a certainty. They could not afford to pass a British
port like this ; stories of oil ships on fire were at a premium after
tea.

It was something to talk about, at any rate.

Hannibal came into the engine-room soon after midnight to
fill his slush-lamp, and the Third told him they'd be in Singa-
pore by dinner-time. The name seemed familiar to him. Of
course! That was where Hiram's ship, the Cygnet, had been
bound. It all came back to him. The picture of the ship in
the office in Billiter Lane. The drone of the traffic out in
Fenchurch Street, the twittering of the canaries, the ding-
clash of the cash register. How infinitely far off that life
seemed now! He could not help smiling as he recalled his
dream of distant lands. Well, it was not so bad. It was
different, certainly, from what he had imagined it, yet he was
not disappointed. He was a man now, among men. Not so
dusty either, when he came to think of it. He had savvy, they
said, at the mess-room table, and the Third treated him with
cautious familiarity. Hannibal laughed when Singapore was
mentioned, " 'cause I'd a friend of mine on a sailin' ship what
went there," he explained to the Third.

" Those are the passenger boats, the Samos, Lesbos, Chios,
and Delos. White hull with buff funnel? I know them. I
was Fifth of the Samos/* said the Third. " What d'you quit
a job like that to come to sea for? "

402 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Have you ever had a job like that, mister? "

" No such luck ! "

" Well, it ain't so nice as it looks. I know I found it pretty
slow. I don't mind work, so long I can get about and see
things. I wanted to see Singapore, somehow."

" You're a funny chap," said the Third. " What about get-
tin' married? I thought you were all for the beach when we
left Swansea."

" So I am in a way. I don't know as I can explain how I
feel about it," Hannibal replied, screwing the top of his lamp
tight and wiping his hands with a piece of waste, " I always
'ad a hankerin' to get away, only I didn't know 'ow to go
about it."

" It's a wasted life, I reckon," said the Third, looking up the
windsail.

Hannibal shook his head decidedly. " No it ain't, mister,"
he said. " Not for us. It's the married men as gets the worst
of it at sea, not us. I can see that."

" And yet you're going to get married ! "

" So I hope," he returned simply. " I expect I'll have had
enough of this by then. But even suppose " And Hanni-
bal put his finger on the Third's singlet. " Even suppose I did.
I ain't going to say it's a wasted life." He wiped his forehead
with the waste and put it down thoughtfully.

The Third watched him stoop, lamp in hand, and open the
iron door under the boilers. " He's a funny cuss," he mused,
and looked up at the ceiling. " I wonder if he's right." And
he went round behind the engines to watch the evaporator.

They anchored far out in the harbour at sundown, just as
the last rays caught the gilded roofs and set them on fire.
Hannibal lay on his pallet on the forecastle and watched it.
Jan smoked beside him. All round the red ensigns were drop-
ping from the poops and across the water came flying skiffs
with many-coloured sails.

" Look, Jan ! " he said, flinging out his hand. " See that
sky?" Jan looked with moody eyes upon the purple and
crimson glory of the western heavens, but his soul was dull
within him. He had awakened in the lazaret, and found the
handcuffs on his hands. " What was the use ? " he asked him-
self. He could not keep away from the drink. Every time
he swore to reform, and every time the evil thing mastered

CASUALS OF THE SEA 403

him. Up on the bridge-deck Tommy was waving flags to the
next steamer, sending a message. Up and down and across
the flags moved, making the simple words by which the seaman
calls to his brother-wanderer round the world. Jan saw him,
and a strange look of longing came into the blue eyes. He
turned to Hannibal.

"Reckon the Old Man'll send us ashore here?" he asked in
a whisper.

"I — I can't say," faltered Hannibal. He had heard a ru-
mour that it might happen.

" I won't go," muttered Jan. " I'll sink first, so help me
God! I've been in here."

" Don't say that," said Hannibal.

" Here," said Jan, " you're next him, you are, I don't know
why, but you are. One o' the sailors told me something. You
speak the skipper. Tell him " — here he bowed his head and
shook with a wheezing cough — "tell him I'm done for. I'll
be finished anyway soon. Tell him no let me die in the cala-
boosh. Eh, will you ? "

Hannibal looked at him carefully. His brown beard was
long and dishevelled, his eyes dry and bright, and his mouth
worked under the moustache. Hannibal remembered that since
Sabang he had eaten nothing, turning with loathing from the
contents of the kid. Suppose he could do this thing for an-
other man? He might. It would be another step in the ascend-
ing effort to full manhood. He nodded and put down his pipe.

" I'll 'ave a shot at it," he said, and went aft to the cabin
door.

Captain Briscoe was sitting at his little table, writing.

" Come in," he said, when he heard the faint tap on the panel.
" Oh, it's you! What's the matter? "

Hannibal told him, and the Old Man stared at him in aston-
ishment.

" What's he to you? " he asked.

" Just a chum, sir. 'E can't keep off the booze. 'E's been
in quod 'ere before, 'e says, and 'e thinks it'll kill 'im. 'E's
sick, sir, sometimes. If it don't make any difference to you,
sir?"

"What do I care about the scum? You ought to keep clear
of that lot. A respectable man has to be careful."

" They ain't so bad, sir," he answered, lifting his hand in

404 CASUALS OF THE SEA

protest. " Only the booze sends them silly. They're men,
any'ow."

"Are they?" returned the Old Man bitterly. "A lot you
know about it. Jail's the place for them, I tell you. Let them
off, and they go and do the same thing again."

" I don't reckon jail makes 'em any better, sir. If they got
any friends, they'll feel bad about it, same as us."

The Old Man remained silent, drumming on the table with
his knuckles.

" Is that why you came here to ask? " he enquired at length,
and Hannibal nodded.

" I'll see," said Captain Briscoe, and the young man went
away with a curious feeling of gladness in his heart. It was
nice to do a thing like that, if you had a chance.

Jan's sickness was not a fake, as the Second, inured to fakes,
grimly pronounced it. He took his watch all the five days
they lay at anchor in Singapore, took it feebly for the first
fortnight of the long pull up the China Seas. Hannibal helped
him by working hard all his own watch, so that Jan had very
little to do. But as they left the islands of Loo Choo melting
into the blue Pacific, he lay in his bunk helpless, and breathing
through dry, cracked lips. The Captain went along with the
Steward and saw at once that the man was sick. He ordered
them to carry him out and lay him on the hatch. A tarpaulin
was put over the boom and hung over the edges, making a
sort of tent with open ends. For two days Jan lay there,
drinking a little barley water, his eyes closed, his breath coming
in irregular spasms, the face above the brown beard like death.
Hannibal would creep in after tea and sit beside him, with his
knees drawn up, smoking a companionable pipe.

" 'Ow's things? " he would ask cheerily, and Jan would open
his eyes and look straight up at the boom. Then he would close
them again, while Hannibal told him the gossip of the day. On
the third day his eyes were open, and looking for Hannibal.
By his side was a milk pudding and a tumbler. One wasted
arm lay across his chest, in the other was a key.

" Eh? " said Hannibal. " What is it? "

" Book in my bag. Little book. Savvy ? "

He took the key obediently and, finding the bag, unlocked
the brass ring that secured the neck, and felt in it for the book.
Then he relocked the bag and returned to the hatch.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 405

"This it?" he asked.

Jan nodded, and whispered " Open it."

Hannibal turned over the leaves. It was in some strange
language, full of harsh cries, croonings, and abrupt dissonances.
He shook his head doubtfully. The fly-leaf fell away, and he
saw a photograph of a young woman. The print had been
stuck in to the book by some unpractised hand, askew, and with
a thumb-mark on the edge. Above was written in thin grace-
ful characters, " Greta Noordhoff, Amsterdam, 1895."

Hannibal looked up and saw the man's bright feverish eyes
watching him. He put down his head.

" You look at that picture ? "

He looked at it again. The full oval of the face was framed
in severely arranged hair, which deceived his inexperienced eye
at first. But the eyes were unmistakable. He noticed the name
again. "Tommy?" he thought.

" Yes," he thought to himself, in some excitement, almost
forgetting the man who was watching his face. Yes, there were
the same long-fringed eyelashes, the same shadows under the
eyes, the same soft mouth and rounded cheek.

"Who is it?" he asked.

" Girl I told you was good to me. I went away, and she
had a baby. When her mother got on to me for money I say
I got none, see? I think it somebody else's. She died, same
as I told you. Now you see that ! Savvy ? "

" Yes," said Hannibal, " I savvy. I'll fetch him."

He had not seen Tommy much of late, and now as he walked
aft it occurred to him that he was bound upon an errand be-
yond his powers. Here were man and boy, aliens, the man
dying in a desperate plight of irreparable neglect, the boy very
much alive and ignorant of the man's history. And he, Han-
nibal Gooderich, only lately seller of tobacco in Billiter Lane,
he was to go along to the boy and say to him, " That man on
the hatch is your father. He's dying, and wants to speak to
you." It was preposterous, a crazy dream. Tommy would tell
him he was not plumb. And yet, there was the name, the date,
the photograph.

He went along the alley-way to his old room. The door was
open, and the boy was sitting with a big red book on his knee,
scribbling figures on a sheet of paper. He looked up with a
smile.

406 CASUALS OF THE SEA

"Hello/' he said. "What's de matter wid you?"

Hannibal stepped inside, closed the door, and sat down beside
him.

" You know that chap who trims on the four-to-eight watch? "
he began. " 'E's a Dutchman."

"He!"

" Yes, and 'e's dying. 'E's got a touch o' the fever 'e got
out 'ere years ago, and the booze has crumpled him all up.
'E's an Amsterdammer."

" Hey ! " Tommy put down his book.

" Yes, and he's got a book there with a photo in it of a girl,
and the name's same as yours. It's — it's your mother, I
reckon." The boy's face relaxed. For him the situation, per-
haps, was not quite so complex as it seemed. Say what you will,
blood-ties are like blood-stains. They can be obliterated. The
hardy convention of the ages still persists that the dark blotch
on the floor remains so forever, that some deep ineradicable
instinct drags forth the shuddering cry of " Father ! " But to
this alien child, who had been sent begging around the ships
as soon as he could walk, who had grown as a sparrow grows,
who had been beaten and starved and frightened by the black-
guards of the sea, who loved where he was loved, and answered
as a dog answers, to him the " call of the blood " was less than
nothing. To him had come no accumulated tradition of par-
entage, no childhood enervated by the delicately insidious busi-
ness of family affection. It had been a slogging fight between
a courageous young spirit and a cowardly old world. It was
only natural that the love of his heart should go to the man
who had stepped in and helped him in his struggle, who had
seen with an artistic vision the eager young soul as he might
be if he were put upon the road. What had he to do with a
father? And so his face relaxed. He reached for his coat.

" I'll come," he said, and together they went forward to the
hatch. The man lay as before, one hand across his chest, the
other by his side, the top of the dishevelled head towards them.
The milk-pudding and the tumbler had not been removed, and
they introduced a note of irreconcilable bathos, for he was dead.
They saw that, and paused beneath the boom. It was as though
the grim Spectre, seated in there beside his last victim, un-
daunted by the milk-pudding, had raised his hand.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 407

And so, having sailed the seas for many years, having de-
bauched the gifts of God, and the love of women, having avoided
with incredible dexterity the esteem of man and the joy of
accomplishment, Jan Ostade went out into the void.

XIX

NINETY days after the Caryatid had crept out of the
shadow of Staten Island, her stockless anchors broke
into the glassy surface of the Gulf of Osaka, and she
was at rest. Only those who have been through the
ordeal can have the dimmest comprehension of the sigh of relief
that passed the lips of every one of the ship's company. The
Caryatid herself seemed aware that for a little while at least
she could brood upon her destiny unharassed by the insistent
urge of her propeller; and the hoarse roar of the safety-valves,
the white feather of steam that floated on the off-shore wind,
intimated to her distant colleagues the fact of her achievement.

The Third Engineer came up from the scarcely-endurable
heat of the boiler-tops, where he had been shutting the mains,
and looked out contemptuously upon the kingdoms of the im-
memorial East. His colourless face was lined and stippled
with black grease, and the bridge of his undistinguished nose
was made diabolically incongruous by a patch of soot, scraped
from some unnoticed projection. He stood there, in easy pose,
neglectful of the chatter in the galley, incurious as to the ensign
at half-mast which Mr. Cadoxton was hastening to pull down,
and moving only when he heard a step behind him. Mr. Spink,
his hair standing many ways, his torso glistening with friction,
a bath towel around his shoulders, and a briar pipe hanging
from his teeth, joined the Third in his contemplation of the
Orient.

" Spink, son," said the Third softly, " call me at one bell,
will you, as usual ? "

" What on earth for? " asked the young man.

" Not for anything on earth, Spink, but for the heavenly
glory of goin' to sleep again. Think of it, O my Spink!
Ninety days have I kept the graveyard watch, and now, once
more, I'm going to have an all night in. Oh! it's too good
to be true."

" You'd better go and get yourself washed then, instead of
wasting valuable time," remarked the prosaic Spink. * I'm get-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 409

ting into the hay right now. We'll have to get busy on them
pump-links in the morning. They've been bangin' something
'orrible."

" Don't talk about it, Spink. Let the morning bring its own
troubles. Let the giddy young Jesmond go round spyhV out
unnecessary jobs. Use your time, while you've got it, free from
responsibility. Behold the land of the Japanee ! "

" I got the log-slate to write up," sighed the Fourth. " The
Chief always grouses if I leave it till the morning, even if he
don't enter it until next week. Ah ! " he put his elbows on the
bulwarks and looked attentively at the shore-lights. " Say,
Tich, this is some scenery, eh, lad ? "

The Third nodded. In a vast semicircle lay the blue moun-
tains crowding upon the twilight sea. From Hyogo, away west-
ward, to the multitudinous brilliance that was Osaka, the lights
ran round in interminable chains and galaxies. From the har-
bour at Kobe flared at intervals a crimson storm-signal, and
electric tramcars, like golden beads on an invisible thread, slid
back and forth, bursting ever and anon into blue fire as the
trolley jumped the wires. High up, the lights of a monastery
burned faintly, showing where sad-eyed monks looked out across
the darkling sea. Over the water came the cries of the fisher-
men, the shrill call of a locomotive, the plaintive clang of a
mysterious bell.

" Yes," said the Third with a yawn, " very pretty if it wasn't
so far from Charing Cross. I suppose that's the launch going
around the breakwater now." And he extended a finger to-
wards Kobe. " I suppose he'll bring back the letters."

" He will that," said Spink, and they went into the alley-
way.

" I was beginning to think," remarked the Third, as he drew
the red ball-fringed curtain across the door of their room, " that
I should never be respectable again. I'm not sure now whether
I've got a clean collar to go ashore in. How fortunate, Spink,
that we both take fifteens! "

Mr. Hopkins, removing a three-days' growth from his chin,
was more concerned about his boilers, I think, than anything
else. The Second, leaning against the door-jamb, his head and
body in shadow, his face in the light, like a dreadful mask, out-
lined in a monotonous undertone his campaign of toil. Mr.
Cadoxton patrolled the deck overhead, and unfolded to the Sec-

410 CASUALS OF THE SEA

ond Mate his theory that the Old Man was a victim of prema-
ture senile decay.

" Take my word for it, Charlie," he said, as they walked to
and fro, " if he doesn't get good news he will be a dithering
idiot before we get home."

" Yes, it's nervous tension," said the fat Second Mate, who
had a habit of startling people by asking if they had read
Herbert Spencer. " That's what it is — nervous tension." Mr.
Cadoxton laughed lightly.

" Under the circumstances," he replied, " I think we may call
it that."

It was nearly half-past nine when, stopping for the hun-
dredth time to scan the dark waters of the bay with his night-
glasses, Mr. Cadoxton detected the approach of a sampan un-
der sail, and moved to the head of the accommodation-ladder.
The craft came around in a circle towards the steamer, the
tiny lantern on the rail sending out an eerie radiance. As
she seemed about to strike the ship end-on, for the off-shore
breeze was blowing freshly, the bamboo gaff slipped down and
the sail fell in soft folds about the dim, naked form of the
boatman. A few skilful manipulations of the big stern oar
brought the boat to the foot of the ladder, and Captain Briscoe
came slowly up the steps. Mr. Cadoxton, peering over the
rail, watched him with intelligent interest. The Captain's head
came in line with a lighted port, and appeared a moment as a
vivid intaglio. As he stepped upon the deck, and you could
tell he was the Captain by the way he did that seemingly sim-
ple thing, he handed the Third Mate a bundle of letters and
newspapers. Mr. Cadoxton, offering his arms for the load,
looked his commander in the eyes.

" Everything all right, sir," he observed.

" Where's the Mate ? " said the Captain in a strong vibrating
voice. He stood solidly on his feet, his broad figure black
against the gangway lantern, the cigar in his fingers glowing.
The Chief Mate came down from the chart-room.

" I want to speak to you," said the Captain in the same
domineering tone. " Get the men out "

They walked off together, and Mr. Cadoxton, putting the
mail down on a hatch, blew his whistle for aid in drawing up
the accommodation-ladder. The Second Mate came over the
deck from his room on the port side.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 411

" Letters," he crooned, turning them over. One by one the
crew came up, holding eager hands.

" Here you are. Bosun, Borgan, Skettles, Rathorne — who's
Rathome? — Nystrom, Noordhoff, Hutchins — that's the Mate
— MacCuskery, Angelatos, Stolypin, here you are. . . ."

Some, leaning towards the lantern, held but one thin letter,
others had three or four ; some, lonely shell-backs, took away
a bundle of newspapers but no letters. The pride of th,ese
men, their simple chuckling pleasure in receiving their quota,
their good-humoured triumph over some eager shipmate who
waited patiently until the distribution was over and found noth-
ing for him, was a curious sight. And very soon the bridge-
deck was deserted. In top bunks, in lower bunks, in the galley,
in rooms with curtained doors, men sat and pored over intimate
communications, public trials, news of fire and flood in that far-
off country across the world. Mr. Cadoxton, seated on the
Second Mate's chest of drawers, lit a cigarette.

" Did you hear him, Charlie? Well, he was terse. There
is no other word for it. Never even answered me. It's my
opinion, Charlie, that the nervous tension you spoke of is
relaxed. He's got his grip again. He'll be nosing around in
his pyjamas at five o'clock to-morrow morning." And he sent
the smoke in fine jets through his nostrils. The fat Second
Mate folded a letter and sighed. " Let him nose," he re-
marked. " I've forgotten more about my work than he can tell
me."

Captain Briscoe, having astonished his chief officer by a
number of unnecessary orders concerning the breaking of bulk
early on the following day, unlocked his room and entered,
shutting the door after him. As he proceeded to divest him-
self of his shore clothes, he whistled a tune. He even paused,
half-naked, to pour out a glass of whisky. As his head emerged
from the singlet, he smiled into the mirror. He took a photo-
graph from over his bunk and kissed it. When his sleeping suit
was adjusted, he lit a fresh cigar, took a packet of letters and
newspapers from his leather case and extended himself on the
settee. Once again he went delightfully through the letter he
had already perused a dozen times.

It could not be called a long letter, the small neat hand-
writing only covered three sides of the thick square paper.
Minnie, in her imperturbable way, discounted the incident which

412 CASUALS OF THE SEA

had given her husband so much misery. It was true she had
been down to Westminster, with a petition.

An old friend of hers, a Mrs. Wilfley, had taken her down
there. And in the uproar that followed they had been arrested
along with many other innocent women. One of the witnesses
was Sir Anthony Gilfillan, m.p., who knew Mrs. Wilfley very
well, and he had bailed them out, had given evidence that they
were innocent. It was very foolish of her husband to take such
a thing seriously. She belonged to a Woman's Club, but she
had no sympathy with window-breakers. She and Mrs. Wilfley
were suffragists, but not suffragettes. She was going on very
well at her flat. Her mother lived with her, and she would be
glad when he came home. She missed him.

It was flawless in its restraint, its quiet undercurrent of
humour, its complete comprehension of his state of mind. The
last paragraph was redolent of her personality.

" You know, George, I never had the gift of the " gab ' very
strong, and writing letters tires me. But I should like you to
know that I think too much of your opinion to do anything
that would hurt you, even if you never heard of it. I do
really. And if I could explain, which would do no good, you
would understand what that means sometimes. Good-bye, dear,
write to me as soon as you arrive. I was at Mrs. Wilfley's
flat the other day to tea, and a gentleman was telling us about
Japan. I almost wish I was with you. It must be a beautiful
place. I do miss you sometimes."

That was one letter. The gem of the collection, he thought,
as he laid it down reverently. The next one was shorter, posted
a week later. It referred to her brother. She didn't quite
know what it was he was doing, but he had thrown up his job
and gone to sea. She knew now he was on the Caryatid. Her
mother thought he might be in danger as he had written say-
ing he might be put on the fires. What in the world was that?

Captain Briscoe laughed happily to himself. His mind
leaped the months before he would be home again. This was
September. By Christmas? It was possible. To the mariner,
getting paid off for Christmas is a foretaste of Heaven. It is
a lovely mirage held ever before his eyes by a sardonic Fate.
Captain Briscoe had not had a Christmas at home for eighteen
years. He had sailed out of Leith in a snowstorm on Christmas
Eve, he had run ashore in the Savannah River, in a fog, on

CASUALS OF THE SEA 413

Christmas morning, and remained there for two days. He had
every reason to be suspicious of that festival. Nevertheless he
lay on his settee making hasty mental calculations. Certainly
they ought to do it if they got despatch in Java. Even if they
went to a Continental port he would get over for Christmas.

His mind reverted to the letter concerning the young fellow.
Minnie could not be expected to understand the enormous gulf
between her husband and her brother on the Caryatid. He
smoked hard as he tried to think of some way in which he could
act upon her hint. He shook his head. It was not possible.
And after all, the young fellow was all right. He seemed quiet,
civil, sober, contented. He expected nothing. When they were
paid off, then he might do something. But here it would be
subversive of all discipline if the Captain interfered with the
Black Squad. He decided it could not be done.

He had gone ashore that afternoon with the dead body of
Jan Ostade, neatly wrapped in canvas, and had superintended
the formalities which that troublesome individual had imposed
upon him by dying within sight of land. It is to be surmised
that Captain Briscoe did not feel much of this minor tragedy
of the sea. When you have lived in the forecastle, where men
die at the most inopportune moments, and are shot over the
bulwarks without benefit of clergy, you cannot set aside your
own personal troubles to weep over a foreign trimmer. Sym-
pathy stretched to cover so wide an area grows thin. To Cap-
tain Briscoe, inasmuch as his charge of the incubus ceased as
he received his letters, it was as though the man had been a
source of bad luck to the ship. With an entry in his log and
a declaration before the Consul his responsibility ended.

But to Hannibal, seated in his customary place against the
windlass, the matter was not to be so dismissed. He felt it
more even than did Tommy, who was at an age when tragedy
is an irksome conundrum. Hannibal tried to comprehend the
workings of Fate, tried to fathom the sublime mystery of death.
In the dim recesses of his mind, he fumbled for the key to the
enigma. He remembered that away back in childhood, in the
days when he had played about Maple Avenue with little
Hiram, he had been able to look with unfrightened eyes into
the phantom world where mysterious shapes moved to and fro.
Why could he not see them now? It puzzled him, as it has
puzzled many of us thoughtful folk, this paradox, that the more

414 CASUALS OF THE SEA

we learn the less we seem to know. He had a sudden and tear-
blinded vision of the innumerable failures, the incredibly fool-
ish failures, with which the progress of the world was strewn.
He remembered, as he sat there smoking in the darkness, that
pamphlet of the Pallas Athene School, Raising the Dead. Was
it possible that those sharp efficient people were right? Was
it entirely the fault of Jan and Mr. Grober, and his own father,
that they had gone down the Dolorous Way that leads to ulti-
mate failure and oblivion? He wondered.

And then another vague idea grew up in his mind, an idea
that perhaps a man's life was not a complete thing in itself, that
perhaps it was but a bead on a string, a link on a chain, the
visible part of an invisible continuity. In the light of that
thought, death seemed a small and theatrical affair. Was that,
then, a solution? It did somehow link up the confusing acci-
dents of existence. It did make the pain seem less sharp. The
essential product of one's life was indestructible, and lived on.
Jan was dead. Tommy was very much alive.

It had not taken him long to read Nellie's letter. Miss Ffitt's
fluency of speech communicated itself to her correspondence.
To tell the truth, she was one of those who endeavour to conceal
a tendency to ramble by means of dashes. Old Snickery was a
drunken old beast. She sometimes wished herself back in
Cardiff — fancy that ! She was talking of a certain Mr. Goode-
rich to a friend of hers the other night — did his ears burn?
She saw Girtie the other night — how was that ittle cherub of
a sailor-boy with the foreign name ? — She was out at the Mum-
bles with her sister-in-law last Sunday — only day she could
get off — it made her very anxious, now she held the licence —
if anything happened — and anything might happen when those
mates and engineers got going — such a time the other night!
The barmaids were frivolous things — needed a tight hand.

It is rather refreshing to find artlessness in correspondence
in our time. Miss Ffitt wrote very much as if she would have
written five thousand years before — in jerky pictures which
were quite unintentionally arresting, and sometimes funny, as
when she described a German captain with " a carroty beard,
a beetroot nose, and onion eyes — but very well bred." Or
the mate of a Scotch sailing-ship, who spent the whole evening
over one glass of whisky — " it was a very close night." She
made no endeavours after tenderness at all, though I think her

CASUALS OF THE SEA 415

simple conclusion, praying that the Lord stand between them
while they were absent one from another, indicates with a cer-
tain naive charm and dignity the plane of her permanent emo-
tion.

XX

SHE came into view slowly, for she was deep laden and
the tug was contemptibly small. Across the burnished
floor that led the eye into the intolerable brilliance of the
Inland Sea, she came reluctantly, her yards thick, with
blobs that were men, her sides cluttered with sampans. She
seemed to hang back, as indeed she did in that current, like
some beautiful sensitive creature ashamed of the noisy vulgarity
of the tug, whose stubby funnel belched a rolling fuliginous
vapour and whose whistle sent forth a raucous and disquieting
bray. As she drew nearer and, simultaneously with the fall of
the anchor the sun dropped behind the shoulder of the Hill of
Hyogo, the still water changed from shining bronze to a clear
silver, and hull and spars showed up sharply like a dry point
etching against an amber sky. With a valedictory shriek the
insufferable tug swept round and made off in the direction of the
breakwater, and the ship, coming up by indistinguishable grada-
tions upon her clanking cable, took on an aspect of repose,
which received its final confirmation from the dispersal of the
sampans, and the slow ascent of a riding light in the rigging.
She lay a mile to the westward, and Mr. Cadoxton, viewing
her through his binoculars, informed the curious that she was
the Cygnet of London, an unusually fine ship.

Hannibal, hanging underwear to dry on the fiddle-grating,
heard the information with pleasure blent with a species of
diffidence. His appreciation of the infinitely subtle sense of
caste that runs up through the ranks of the Merchant Service
was too just to permit any dallying with the notion of the well-
bred sailing ship apprentice receiving a steamship trimmer with
unfeigned joy. He knew as well as Captain Briscoe now, that
you cannot do as you like in such matters. It would have been
nice to go ashore with an old friend, he admitted, and sighed.
It would be nice to go ashore anyway. This was Friday. He
reflected. To-morrow he would receive ten shillings. He did
not want to go ashore urgently, and yet he felt restless. Since

416

CASUALS OF THE SEA 417

they were arrived at the end of the voyage he had tried to
take up reading again, having got a bundle of shilling novels
from the Third Engineer. Perhaps the Third Engineer was
not quite the man to lend a young fellow books, for his taste in
literature was sophisticated. Hannibal had a feeling of un-
easiness as he read some of those novels, as though he were
being forced to peer through the keyhole of a bedroom door.
It was not that what he read was so very shocking. It was
going on all the time anyhow, he agreed to himself. It was
the way they put it, " they " being in the most cases ladies.
Further analysis eluded his untutored mind. The stimulating
effect upon his imagination was the root cause of his restless-
ness.

They were going to make a party in the forecastle, to econo-
mise in the matter of sampans, it being clearly understood that
on setting foot ashore each one should be free to go as he pleased.
Angelatos asked Hannibal if he was going with anybody, and
he answered quietly that he was on his own.

" I'll go with you," announced the Greek. " Tees fellows
all bums." Hannibal reflected that if he really desired to see
life and put in what the Third called " a pretty tough evening,"
Angelatos was the man.

But he did not so desire. The rough work in the furnaces
and combustion-chambers, the stifling and blinding toil of tube-
sweeping was not to be compensated by an insensate carouse.
He had seen Angelatos in his cups, and the sight was not a
beautiful one. And yet it was obvious that, in his own poor
way, the man was desirous of going ashore with a respectable
shipmate who might perchance keep him away from evil. " Tees
fellars all bums " was a plain though tactless condemnation of
the others.

Allowing for the difficulty of keeping a suit of clothes in a
canvas bag, Hannibal presented a fairly decent appearance as
he stood waiting for the sampan. Captain Briscoe, patrolling
his bridge, observed with satisfaction the young man's respecta-
bility. Collars were a rarity in the fireman's forecastle, and
Hannibal, unlike the Third, had made certain of his, and it
chafed his brown neck with unaccustomed severity. Angelatos,
in a suit of violent stripes and a purple silk scarf knotted at
the throat, leaned negligently against the rail, a cigarette be-
tween his lips. Captain Briscoe came down the ladder.

418 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Get forward if you want to smoke," he ordered sternly,
and the big Greek, flinging the offending thing into the sea,
moved away with a muttered imprecation. Hannibal met the
Old Man's eye tranquilly.

" Better keep clear of that lot," said the Captain. " They'll
get you into trouble."

" I'll watch that, sir," he answered.

The sampan arrived soon after and they all descended, some-
what abashed before the supercilious gaze of Mr. Cadoxton, fall-
ing over each other as they stepped upon the bobbing gunwale.
The naked boatman heaved his sail, and as they cleared the
ship's side the breeze bore them across towards the Cygnet,
under whose stem they would pass. Hannibal looked out eagerly
as they neared her. She seemed much smaller than when in
the London Dock. Only when beneath her did he appreciate
again the enormous span of her main yard and the perilous
height of the masts. And then he saw Hiram and waved his
hand excitedly. The young man was leaning over the side!
and answered involuntarily, as one will. With some surprise
Hannibal found the sampan rounding the stern and steering
for the Cygnet's ladder. The boatman lowered his sail, seized
a rope flung out to him, and made fast. Hannibal came to a
decision. He grasped the rope-handrail and stepped out. The
boatman took a basket from under the seat and handed it to
him, pointing upward.

" Hi ! " called Angelatos. " Where goin' ? "

" See a friend o' mine," replied Hannibal, holding the basket
firmly. " See you later." And he climbed the ladder.

" Several brown faces appeared over the bulwarks and exam-
ined him curiously as he ascended. A man with a full black
beard under a peaked cap held out his hand for the basket.

" I'm off the Caryatid" Hannibal explained. Already the
sampan was standing away towards the breakwater. " The
boatman gi' me this. There's a friend o' mine — oh, there he
is!"

Hiram came up, a brown hand extended.

" Friend of mine, sir," he explained to the Mate, who nodded
and went aft. " Well ! " Hiram went on. " Where on earth
have you sprung from? I thought you were working in Lon-
don."

" Don't you remember ? " asked Hannibal, smiling. " I asked

CASUALS OF THE SEA 419

you — that day I come down to the docks — about gettin' a job
on a ship ? "

" I never gave it a thought," said Hiram. " Come into our
room." He led the way along to the forecastle. " I can't wait
now. We're just going to wash decks. Will you wait here till
we're through ? We shan't be long."

Hannibal nodded and sat down. He felt somewhat shy in
the midst of all the spotless cleanliness of the sailing ship after
the unavoidable dirt of a steamer. He found himself looking
up at a photograph of Mrs. Gaynor, and the sight of it brought
back with a vivid clearness the life in Maple Avenue. Her
calm amiable features, with the slight touch of ironic resignation
in the corners of the mouth, reminded him, by contrast, of his
mother. He had always been the least little bit afraid of Mrs.
Gaynor. She savoured of the efficient class somewhat. He re-
membered dimly conversations, mainly monologues, in which she
had advised his mother of " the best way " to do things. She
had even commented upon the folly of putting collars on chil-
dren, and he recalled little Hiram's blue woollen jerseys. Ob-
viously his mother attached too much importance to appearances.
He turned his neck irritably in his collar as it scratched him.

It was not long before he heard the swishing of water on
the deck, the brief orders of the bosun, the pattering of bare
feet and the scrubbing of brooms. Out on the water the Caryatid
lay, strangely insignificant. He fell to wondering if he had
done wisely in succumbing to that great desire to go out and
see the world. He was seeing it sure enough; but was he
happy? He decided that, taking it all in all, he was. And
then he thought with anticipating pleasure of going ashore with
Hiram. Hiram had changed vitally to Hannibal's eyes since
boyhood. This was natural. Three years at a grammar school
are potent factors in any personal equation. He had a " tone "
which Hannibal was sensitive to appreciate but too untutored
to ape. When he came in, his trousers rolled to his knees,
his legs wet with salt water, his grey eyes smiling, Hannibal
felt that he had not made a mistake in acting upon that im-
pulse and coming aboard. But he set out to make quite sure.

" I say," he said, " I came aboard 'ere accidental, you know,
I didn't think the sampan was comin' alongside."

" Well, I'm very glad you did, Hanny. Here's my chum.
Harry, you remember this chap in London ? "

420 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" I saw him come aboard," said the brawny youth, shaking
hands. " How d'you like the briny ocean ? "

" It's none so bad," said Hannibal. " What I was goin' to
say," he went on to Hiram, " is that I'm in the fo'c'sle on the
Caryatid. I'm — a trimmer."

"What a job!" exclaimed Hiram. "Pretty thick, isn't it?"

" Ah, at times. But I soon got sick o' washin' dishes. I'm
tellin' you 'cause I know what the deck thinks . . ." His eye
wandered to their faces. Harry Grantly, working socks on to
his damp feet, grunted.

" I've been scraping the bilges in the fore-peak all the morn-
ing," he said. " I don't know what trimming's like, but if it's
anyway worse than bilges you have my sympathy."

" Or guano," said Hiram, holding his nose.

" You understand ? " said Hannibal. " Or p'raps you don't.
What I mean is, deck keep to themselves on a steamer, and
don't 'ave any truck with the firemen. I don't blame 'em either,"
he added. " They're a pretty tough lot."

** Were you going ashore ? " asked Hiram.

"Yes. Are you?"

" What is it, Harry ? Beach to-night ? "

" Might as well. We'll take a walk up to the Quarter, eh ? "

"Where's that?" Hannibal asked, and they laughed.

" Don't you know ? " said Hiram, and they laughed again.

" I've heard," remarked Hannibal, and flushed. " I've never
been to any o' those places, though."

" Oh," said Harry, peeling. " We just go and have a lock
round, you know."

" I see."

They laughed again.

They began to talk of their voyages, and Hannibal told
them of the Caryatid's long pull across the world, the fire in
the bunkers, the dust-up in Sabang, and all the little incidents
that make up the simple annals of the sea. And they in their
turn told him of their manifold wanderings, of wonderful places
like Rangoon and Hong-Kong, places with names that rever-
berated in the mind like the solemn boom of a temple bell. He
found it very pleasant to talk to these hard-bitten, clean-limbed
youths with the brown faces and clear, steady eyes. They had
acquired a certain quiet dignity, engendered of their long lonely
cruising, that sat quaintly enough upon their young shoulders.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 421

Had you compared them in your mind with a couple of clerks,
you would have seen the enormous gulf that lay between. There
was a precision of speech and gesture, a sureness of touch, an
expression of energy in repose in the boyish features that is the
inalienable heritage of the sea.

It was when they were ashore that Hannibal found it more
difficult to absorb the full spirit of their emancipated outlook.
" I'm engaged," he protested, when they plagued him with the
sailor's catechism, and the dull red flush mounted to his cheeks.
He followed them in a sort of panic. The heat, the dust, the
multitudinous sounds and colours, the jolting of the rickshaw
over the uneven roadways, the astounding vistas of temple-
gardens and the vivid blue of the mountains beyond — these
things disturbed his wonted balance. And he realised with a
certain subconscious shame that in the panic was pleasure. He
felt as thougli he stood before a great gaudy curtain hung across
the pathway of life, and he trembled all over as he thought
of what lay behind. By obscure yet infallible channels he un-
derstood that these two young men had already explored this
exquisite secret.

As in a dream he found himself with them in a strange room
up a dark stairway. It was dark now, and the semi-transparent
wall glowed with the light of a lamp in the room beyond.
They sat there on chairs, their faces showing dimly to one
another in the strange twilight. At times a form would sud-
denly grow enormous on the paper-screen, fade away, and van-
ish with the inconsequence of a nightmare. A small figure ap-
peared abruptly, a sharp silhouette that reached out a hand.
The panel slid silently.

" Here they come," said Harry.

They came, three dark heads bowed low in a line, three
quaint little creatures in kimonos of violet, orange, and pink,
with vivid splashes of crimson, with fans fluttering in their
tiny hands, with hair coiled so firmly it seemed carved in jet.
They came in little runs, smiling out of inscrutable almond
eyes. The young men watched, as though the East held them
in its mysterious grasp. Hannibal heard the low musical mur-
mur of a gong. The whole thing was preposterously unreal.
He remembered his dreams of what seemed centuries ago.
Dreams of fair creatures who were his slaves, phantoms of the
night. They were cold logic compared with this tiny being who

422 CASUALS OF THE SEA

floated to him, whose porcelain skin caressed his face, and whose
baby arms crept about his neck. He felt suddenly the enormous
humour of the thing. He was a Gulliver among these Lilliputian
women. He burst out laughing. Here was richness of expe-
rience. Here indeed went up in flames the last of the Little
Brown Box. None again could say he had not lived. . . .

The murmur of the gong rose and fell on the air. There
was a nervous quality in the sound that made him laugh. He
felt that otherwise he would be unable to look across and meet
his companions' eyes.

" You love me ? " cooed the strange little creature, pinching
his ear. He looked round before answering and found a paper
wall obstrucing his view.

" You love me, eh ? " persisted the girl.

" You," he said, patting her cheek. " Why, you look as if
you'd come off a Christmas tree, you funny little baggage."

" You no love Jappy gel ? " she said, with her eternal smile.
"All same. Chop?"

XXI

THEY were sixteen days out from Shiminoseki, going
eleven knots. Captain Briscoe and Mr. Cadoxton ex-
changed trite irrelevances to relieve the tedium of the
watch.

"What's the matter with him anyway, sir?"

" Blest if I know. I thought — 'pon my word, at one time it
was cholera. But it would show itself before now if it was."

" He was jolly sick. I heard him chattering away in that
spare berth one night. Absolute rot, of course."

Captain Briscoe took a turn up and down the bridge. Mr.
Cadoxton, smiling in the darkness, examined the horizon with
care through his night glasses.

"See it?" said the Captain.

" Nothing so far, sir."

" Ought to raise it soon. We'll be at anchor by breakfast-
time. What was he talking about ? "

" Well, I hardly care to say, sir. A man says anything in
delirium, you know."

" What was it ? Anything about me ? "

" As a matter of fact, it was, sir. That was why I didn't
care to repeat it. He was quite ' all abroad.' "

" Shows how murder will out, eh? "
I haven't repeated it, sir," replied Mr. Cadoxton, and he
resumed his scrutiny of the darkness. Captain Briscoe went
into the chart room and studied the Madura Strait. He had
never been through here before, but he was under no anxiety.
It was absurdly simple for a ship in ballast. The soundings
near the point were somewhat vague, certainly, but the light
on the shoal to the eastward was clear. It would be a feather
in his cap if they caught the charter, and here they were fifty
miles from port, with two days in hand. He had promised
each one of the black squad a pound if they made Sourabaja
in seventeen days. It was good going for the old Caryatid,
with her bottom curtained and festooned with weed and shell.
He relit his cigar and went out again into the night.

" There they arc, sir," murmured Mr. Cadoxton, and pointed.
There they were indeed, dead ahead.

423

424 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Not so bad," remarked Captain Briscoe.

" Very good, sir/' assented the young man. " The currents
are beastly hereabouts. I was ashore a week on Laut Island,
three years ago."

" Laut's a day behind. I am going to keep as near the shoal
as I can. I don't like that end of Madura at all."

" No, sir."

The Old Man struck a match and relit his cigar. The Third
Mate observed a look of pride in his face.

" I told you that story was all a fake, in the papers about
my wife?" Captain Briscoe began.

" Oh, yes, sir."

" You see, it don't do to take these things too much at heart,
does it? I knew my wife wouldn't do a thing like that. She's
not that sort."

u No, sir."

" Now the young feller has been telling things about me in
his delirium, I suppose you think you've got a pull on me,
eh?"

" I shouldn't put it that way, sir. As I said, I have not
repeated it, and have no intention of doing so. Hadn't we bet-
ter shift her half a point to the west'ard, sir? "

" No, keep her as she is. Go and look at the patient log,"
said the Captain in a sudden pet. Mr. Cadoxton took an elec-
tric torch from his pocket and fled away aft. Captain Briscoe
went to the wheel-house and altered the course a point.

" Forty-eight, sir. That's a hundred since noon," said Mr.
Cadoxton.

" You see, Mr. Cadoxton, I'm navigating this ship, I think."

" Precisely, sir," said the young man stiffly, and moved away.
The Captain came over and stood by him.

" Forget it," he said. " I get worked up, sometimes. You
understand, Cadoxton? Worked up. That young feller's ill-
ness has worried me."

" Oh, don't mention it." Mr. Cadoxton still spoke stiffly.

" But I must. It isn't enough to know you won't say any-
thing about what he said of me. What did he say? Out with
it."

" Merely that you were a relative of his by marriage, sir.
I can't see "

"Nothing else?"

CASUALS OF THE SEA 425

Mr. Cadoxton was silent. He felt quite unable to say what
else he had heard the sick man saying. One had to draw a line
somewhere.

" My God, Cadoxton! Do you tell me " The Old Man

broke off.

" I didn't speak, Captain."

" Then why don't you? "

" Very unpleasant thing to discuss. Best to let it drop," said
Mr. Cadoxton shortly.

" But suppose you can't let it drop, Cadoxton ? Suppose you
had it with you day and night for months?"

"Well, sir?"

"Well, Cadoxton, that's me. You heard things, did you?
Well, / heard things, to my face too. I went in to see him one
morning, and he says ' I can't make it out.' ' Can't make out
what?' I asked him, and he says, clear as a bell, 'Sister!' I
took his arm to put the thermometer under it, and he looked
at me like a scared kitten, and says, ' Why, I ought to have told
'em about you. You're the man,' he says. I tried to keep
steady and shoved his arm down in the bunk. ' Keep quiet,'
I said; 'it won't hurt you/ 'Oh, no,' he said, laughing to
himself. ' A little thing like that won't hurt me. My father's
dead, my brother's dead, and here's me dead too. Sister's all
right,' he said. ' Catch her being dead. Wonder why mother
ain't dead too, though? that's funny. I must ask the Old Man
about that' And so he went on. I couldn't stand it, and came
out and got him a sleeping draught. You see what I'm going
through? And it isn't as though it was just for the voyage
cither. It's for every voyage; it's for all time, Cadoxton."

" I'm sorry, sir," said the young man, but he never took his
eyes from the two lights ahead.

" Some men," said Captain Briscoe, " would go over the
side." He pulled himself together and laid his hand on the
telegraph. " I knew a chief once who was in something of the
same position. Came back to Swansea and found the girl he'd
been leaving half-pay to — you've heard the story, eh? Ten
years! My God! It got on his mind, you see. But I'm going
to beat this, Cadoxton! I'm going to win this hand. You're
young. You've got your tickets in your pocket, and all your
life in front. You're pitying me, the poor fool of a shell-back
that's done for himself by marrying out of his course. Well,

426 CASUALS OF THE SEA

you may be down and out yet, but you'll find I'm still living
and sticking in at it. I've got one thing the women can't touch.
I'm master, and I've never had an accident yet. Coal- fever I've
had, but that's nothing. The Chief's to blame there. Up here
my record's clean. That's all I live for now. Eh? what's
that?"

The look-out on the forecastle had shouted something. The
fifteen-second light on the shoal threw a whitish green glare
over the ship.

" He says he can see the beach this side of the lighthouse,
sir," said Mr. Cadoxton.

" Port," barked the Old Man, but it was too late. The bows
of the Caryatid rose up as though she were rearing back from
some unseen terror of the sea, and she rolled over to starboard
and lay trembling. The Third Mate had dragged the handle
of the telegraph to full astern, and the perspiring Spink, who
had picked himself up from under the forced-draught fan, had
the time of his life, throwing the reversing-gear over all alone.
It was glorious, he thought. They were ashore, and him on
watch. No doubt about that. Look at the chatty hanging all
askew in the ventilator. The Chief came pouring down the
ladder, looked at the telegraph, found his pipe and hunted on
the vice-bench for matches.

" Let her rip," he muttered, puffing. " They've piled her up
on a coral reef. Open the fan a bit." And he went up to look
around.

The Caryatid's stern was in deep water, her bows were up
on a beach of gleaming coral within two hundred yards of a
steel-verandahed lighthouse. The heavy bucking of the pro-
peller going astern at seventy revolutions palpitated throughout
the empty ship. Mr. Hopkins peered over the side as the light
swung around. Far away below him he could see the white
bunches of coral in the shallowing water. Humph! He be-
came aware of the Old Man standing beside him.

" Nice little business, eh ? " said the Captain, as though he
were admiring a greengrocer's shop in a market town. " That's
working by chart, you see."

"Miss the charter?"

" Looks damn like it. Here, Chief, just keep that, will you?
Give it me back when we get home."

Mr. Hopkins found something heavy drop into his pocket.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 427

For some moments after the Captain had gone forward again,
he remained motionless, looking over at the water pouring in
torrents from the discharges. And then he withdrew for a mo-
ment to his room.

Hannibal, sleeping in the spare berth, woke to find his face
pressed hard against the bulkhead. He turned his head and
listened. Yes, the engines were going — how the ship trem-
bled. Going — going astern. He sat up feebly. A faint glare
flashed across the room, and vanished — came again — and van-
ished. He felt the curtains of the bunk tickling his ears. He
leaned over and turned up the lamp — it was leaning away
from him drunkenly. His trousers on a hook on the wall dis-
played the same crazy propensity. His thin frowsty face, with
the brown eyes ringed with blue, leaned out over the bunk-
board. Suddenly he realised that he might be in danger, and
he lay back on the pillow. He heard footsteps pass his door
hurriedly. He was forgotten. Languidly he put a white, bony
leg over the board, then the other, and sat up pressing his
hands over his eyes. He felt very weak and ill. Tommy had
looked in that evening, and told him he'd been crazy for a
week. Crazy ! What did Tommy mean by that ? Why, Tommy
meant he had been talking queer and not knowing what he said.
He could not remember. It made his head tired to think.

Kobe? Yes, he could remember that. And a day or two in
the bunkers. And then? No good. And he wanted a drink
of water. Where was the bottle? Of course, empty. He put
his head out to the chest of drawers, and explored with his left
foot for the settee. Where was it, dammit? At last!

Still the ship shivered, as the engines raced astern. He crept
to the hooked door and looked through the crevice. A man,
somebody, one of the crew, went past, and Hannibal called in
a husky whisper, " Hi! What's up, eh? " But he did not hear.
Every few seconds the light came in his face and made him
flinch. He fumbled with the hook and the door slammed in his
face. He sat down on the settee and fingered the sweat on his
forehead. What should he do? He heard footsteps overhead,
the hoarse growl of the bosun, the crack of a block striking the
boat-deck. Boats ! They were getting the boats out. He made
another effort to rise, succeeded, and laid his thin hand on the
door knob. It was stiff, and when it turned he had to lean

428 CASUALS OF THE SEA

against it to get it open. He stepped out into the starlight,
shivering.

Upon the bridge he saw figures moving about, other figures
standing rigid, their elbows stuck out stiffly as they looked
through glasses at the lighthouse. Two ruby red lights hung
from the foremast rigging, one below the other. Then with
a crack and a groan of protest the boat above his head swung
out-board, and the bosun shouted, " Make fast." Hannibal saw
some one squatting down against the funnel-casing. He crept
along the bulkhead, shaking and with his teeth chattering, and
spoke to the man. The light swerved around upon them, and
he saw the flattened smiling features of the Japanese fireman —
Jan's successor.

"What's matter, Jappy?" he whispered, and the Oriental
smiled, showing all his teeth. He clashed his hands together,
with a gesture of collision, and pointed overside. Hannibal
stumbled to the rail and looked down. The tide was going
out and the Caryatid's port bow was high and dry. She was
tilted and listed horribly. And the engines had stopped.

The sailors came down from the house and drifted aft to get
out a tow rope. Tommy was one of them, and he ran up to
Hannibal, his eyes bright with excitement.

" She's ashore, all right, all right," he spluttered. " See de
bottom? Dere! Nearly hit de lighthouse. In de morning we
goin' to de lighthouse. I'm going. Dey speak Dutch."

He ran away after the others and left Hannibal on the
bunker hatch. He wondered what he should do. It seemed
wrong somehow to go back to his bunk while all the rest were
busy. He struggled to his feet and went slowly along the alley-
way abaft the engine-room. The Chief was standing there
talking to the Second, who was in his pyjamas.

" What are you doin' out here ? " they asked him. The
harshness of their voices appalled him. He leaned against the
house.

"Can't — can't I do anythin', sir?" he quivered, and they
laughed brutally.

" Get away and turn in," said the Second, taking his arm.
Hannibal resented this weakly.

"Are they going to leave me 'ere? " he asked, hanging back.

" Aw, go on wi' ye ! What's the matter, man ? We don't
quit a ship because she's ashore. Come on! Here you are.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 429

Xow get in and go to sleep. We'll be off in the morning."

But it was not so. When the dawn rushed over the Java
Sea, the Caryatid lay there, sullenly indifferent to charters,
engines, everything. The Mate had lowered a kedge anchor
into a boat, and rowing off had dropped it in deep water.
And then with the winch he had hauled it in again, a few rags
of weed and crumbs of coral hanging to the flukes. Three
times he did it, and then desisted. A small Dutch gun-boat,
grey-white in the dawn, all awning and brass hand-rails, hove
to and offered to tow. She towed and towed, her screw kick-
ing the blue water into useless effervescence, and the Caryatid
lay on, disdainful of gun-boats, her nose sticking up rudely to
the opaline sky. And to-morrow her charter expired.

At six o'clock Mr. Cadoxton, his usually ruddy face grey
from lack of sleep, took a crew of four, including the linguistic
Tommy, and rowed over the shallows to the spidery lighthouse.
It was like a many-verandahed bandstand, and they could see
the occupants swinging in hammocks. Far off on the silent wa-
ter, black proas, with vast multicoloured three-cornered sails
hovered like enormous butterflies. Up on the bridge, Captain
Briscoe walked swiftly to and fro, his hair and beard criss-
crossed, his hands clenched in his pockets in impotent rage,
counting the never-ending minutes as the Third Mate gesticu-
lated with the lighthouse-keeper. At last they descended the
invisible iron ladder, cast off and began to row back. He went
down, and waited by the ladder, as Mr. Cadoxton came up hand
over hand.

" Well? " he asked, his voice harsh with anxiety.

" He says, according to Xoordhoff, sir, that the highest tide
of the year is to-morrow morning. She may come off."

" How many fathom? "

" Three and a quarter metres, sir — that's well over ten feet."

Captain Briscoe turned away.

"All hands there!" shouted the Third Mate. "Now!"

And the boat came up, the blocks screaming over Hannibal's
head.

At breakfast, Mr. Hopkins sat in his accustomed place, eat-
ing the dry toast of the bilious. The low hanging brass cuddy
lamp, that formed the only ornament of the room, was swung
forward into his face. He ignored it in his impassive way.
Spink, still flushed with the excitement of being " down be-

430 CASUALS OF THE SEA

low at the time/' found it necessary to prop his plate up with
a piece of bread to keep the porridge in. It was an irksome
business sitting at such an angle. Suppose she rolled over!
The Third's glassy eye fixed on the boy as he put the fish
on the table, a phlegmatic irresponsive boy, impervious to hints,
and cherishing a permanent grievance because he had been trans-
ferred from the Steward's pantry to the mess-room. He re-
turned the Third's stare without emotion.

" Suppose she rolls over ! " said the Third. " You remember
that Italian ship at Spezia, Chief? Brand new, launched with-
out ballast, went over on her side. 'Straordinary thing that:
took half an hour to do it too. They got a cinematograph down
and made a film of it. There she is now."

Mr. Hopkins looked into his tea, merely raising his eye-
brows.

" Ah, but Tich, that was different, man," said the Second.
" We're in deep water aft. She isn't making any water. Did
the Old Man say anything about lightening her, Chief? "

" Two hundred ton," gloomed the Chief, handing his cup to
the boy, " after breakfast."

More excitement!

They were breaking open the hatch between the funnel and
the bridge when the real fun with signals began. All the morn-
ing coasting craft and fishing proas had hung about them, hun-
gry for pickings. Some even landed on the coral by the light-
house and obtained information. The gunboat had gone away
up to Sourabaja for coal, incidentally taking word to the agents.
The word flashed across the wires to Singapore, to Suez, to Malta,
Marseilles, Hamburg, London. The price of sugar in England
quivered a decimal point. A notice was up at Lloyds, giving
her price at eleven guineas per cent for reinsurance. At noon
she was still there, and the price was eighteen guineas. At tea
time, just as the Fourth proposed a game of bridge and the
Third Mate agreed to take a hand, silk-hatted men, running
between the Baltic and Billiter Lane, spoke of twenty guineas
per cent.

But the real fun was not in the Baltic; it was on the Carya-
tid, and the cause of it was the incoming string of steamers.
One after another they hove into view — Dutch liners, German
liners, British liners; they caught sight of the Caryatid, rushed
up to her and burst into cascades of flags. As Mr. Cadoxton

CASUALS OF THE SEA 431

told the Second Mate, " You could see them licking their lips."
Salvage !

Their enquiries were urgent and sincere. Do you want as-
sistance? Shall I stand by? Send a boat! Do you need a
tow? And so on. To all of which the Caryatid: "Am all right.
Require no assistance.*' They swung there, reluctant to leave
her, their rails lined with passengers, their innumerable port-
holes sprouting white wind-scoops, their decks awninged from
stem to stern. They would get tired at last, go astern and
swing round, heading in disgust for Sourabaja.

Meanwhile the coal eame up in baskets and splashed into
the sea on either side. All day long Hannibal heard the rum-
ble and bump of the barrows in the 'tween-decks below him,
the splutter of the winch and the dry hiss and plop as the
coal hit the water. All day long he lay there in his bunk turn-
ing things over in his mind. Sometimes his head got light and
time passed unconsciously. Sometimes he dreamed and woke
with sweat on his face. All the time the bolster was wet under
his neck, turn it as he might. He drank all the water in the
bottle, and found himself weeping because he could not call
for more. At noon the Steward brought him some broth and a
milk pudding. "Water!" whispered Hannibal, showing a hot
tongue.

My Gawd ! " said the Steward. " Drunk it all ? I only
filled it at breakfast time." And he went to get more.

Hannibal took a little of the soup and lay down again. He
did not want milk pudding. He remembered with awful clear-
ness the milk pudding beside the dead Jan, on the hatch. At
four o'clock Tommy, with his face as black as a nigger-minstrel,
popped in to give him the news.

" I been trimmin'," he chirruped, " down in de 'tween-deck.
It's pretty hard work, eh? Second Mate 'e says we come off
soon. How you feel ? Bad ! "

Hannibal nodded with closed eyes. Tommy looked at him
gravely for a moment and went away to wash himself.

" I reckon," he said to the junior apprentice as they scrubbed
industriously at their buckets, " I reckon dat chap '11 be a stiff
soon, eh ? "

" Oh, he'll be all right, when we're homeward bound," said
the other. " It's only fever."

To Hannibal everything seemed an immense distance away.

432 CASUALS OF THE SEA

The noises on deck sounded dim, mere ghosts of sounds, the
light of the ten-inch port was a far-off moon. He was not con-
scious of having a body at all. He seemed to float idiotically in
the bunk. Only his head ached, and the warm sticky perspira-
tion trickling behind his ears worried him.

Nevertheless he was better. He knew that, in a vague imper-
sonal way. His wasted body had been purged clean, and his
mind, or his soul if you like, that was purged too. It seemed
to him he had been an awfully wicked young man in Japan. He
had given way to his desires, regardless of everything. He tried
to think what the Browns would say if they only knew. Or his
mother. Fancy him, of all people, rioting, drinking beer, mak-
ing himself sick on that beastly saki, sleeping in tea-houses. It
was true he was not the only one. Even Hiram ! He wondered
what Mrs. Gaynor thought. Did she know? She seemed to
know a good deal more than she ever let on. What a time it
was !

But it was all over and done with. The sickness had cleared
all the dross from his nature. He was going home. Oh! how
glad he would be to get back to Swansea, to lean his head on
Nellie's shoulder and pray her to look after him. The tears
gathered under his eyelids and ran down his cheek to his ears
as he thought of it. The sea had been too much for him. He
loved it, for all that. The great beautiful round blue sea! It
had lured him, tempted him, crushed him, purged him. He did
not want to die. He was young, yet how old he felt! Some-
times it seemed as though he had lived through a lifetime in the
last six months. And Billiter Lane, where even now silk-hatted
men discussed the re-insurance of the Caryatid, seemed a hun-
dred million miles away.

It was tide-time at seven o'clock that evening, but the bridge
party on the after-deck, gathered on stools round a wicker table
the Third had bought in Las Palmas, cut and played as though
they were in port. Mr. Hopkins, grown tired of Ivanhoe, leaned
over the bulwarks and eyed the little island of coal alongside.
It made his heart bleed, for it was good Moji stuff, and he knew
the vile Bengal rubbish awaiting him in Sourabaja. Suddenly
he threw up his head. He put his fingers in his mouth and sent
forth a piercing whistle. The bridge-players looked up.
" Movin' ! " he called hoarsely. " She's shiftin'. Get the stops
open, Spink."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 433

Over went the stools, tables, cards, everything. The bridge-
party had vanished. The Old Man on the bridge tugged at
the telegraph, for he too had been leaning over the rail and
noticed the slight movement. Down below the Second was
breaking every recommendation of the Board of Trade, getting
steam into the engines. The excited Spink splashed oil round
on the cups, in the crankpit, on the Second's head, everywhere.
The Third stood to the stokehold, and told Angelatos that his
mother was no better than she should have been, and watched
the steam gauge needle crawl round. The engines responded
to the Second's efforts with much hammering of water traps,
much groaning of journals. Then, with a rush and a storm of
escaping steam she started. Away aft the water surged under
the shuddering counter, and the Second Mate strained his eyes
to detect any movement of the ship. Mr. Hopkins, wondering
if the Second had bust anything, kept his eye on the lighthouse.
Some one shouted, " She's goin' ! " And some one else, less
sanguine, drawled, " No, is she ? "

But she was. This time the sanguine one had it. Down
below, as they raced round thumbing the bearings, shifting the
checks, and doing all the little things overlooked in the first mad
turmoil, Spink created a sensation by pointing to the chatty
hanging in the ventilator. It was straight! It quivered, swing-
ing slightly from side to side, as though it said, " There ! what
do you think of that? I'm straight again ! "

" She's away sure enough," admitted the Second. " Floatin',"
and he watched the telegraph.

44 Home for Christmas, Spink ! " bellowed the Third, as he
twirled the swab-bush in the pot. " Stories round the fire —
mistletoe — stockin's — brandy round the duff, Spink ! "

44 No wonder I sold a farm to go to sea," grinned Spink.

XXII

THEY made up a bed for him on the poop, just by the
ice-box, and from there he caught sight of Perim, as
they began the race neck-and-neck with the deserts up
the Red Sea. It had been a long hot day across the
Indian Ocean via Colombo, and the Red Sea was fifteen hundred
miles long. Six days they ploughed onward, and Hannibal won-
dered why it was called Red. It certainly was red-hot. The
winds from the desert struck his face like a furnace blast, and
little birds dropped dead on the deck with the heat. He used
to watch them flying, screaming with agony as the death-hawks
pursued them. Poor little things, to come so far to find death!
One night he looked up at the ice-box and saw two of them
asleep side by side, their beaks laid together for comfort. He
raised himself gently and drew near to them, but they slept
on. " Poor little dicks," he muttered, feeling a lump in his
throat. It moved him profoundly, the sight of those tiny casuals
of the sea, and he never forgot it. Somehow they seemed akin
to him, and the yellow death-hawks with their spotted plumage
and horrible faces — they were efficients. Their wings were
strong, their sight was keen, their beaks were sharp, like those
clever people who made money and looked down on him at home.

One morning, as the Gulf of Suez loomed ahead and the
cool breeze flapped the awning, he asked for his clothes. He
wanted to get up and work. The Chief lounged along and
inspected him. There was not much of him except skin and
bone, and Mr. Hopkins shook his head. The Second joined him.

" If you want to turn to," said the latter, " come into the
engine-room. I'll put Snyder in the bunker, Chief. There's
worlds of scouring to do. I daren't go into Liverpool with an
engine-room like a ship-chandler's store. You go on day-work,
six to six, see? What you want is plenty of soup and greens.
You'll soon pick up."

So into the engine-room he went, and picked up to a certain
extent. It was amazingly good to be about again, to feel one
was useful, and the Third made him Jaugh so much that his

434

CASUALS OF THE SEA 435

weak body ached. They were all very joyful because, barring
accidents, they would be home for Christmas. All day long
they toiled, painting, scrubbing, polishing. Hannibal went all
over the hand-rails, and even Mr. Hopkins made humorous signs
that the brilliance was painful to his eyes.

They passed through the Canal at night, and Hannibal, with
his overcoat buttoned up, for it was piercingly cold, watched the
great beam of the searchlight cutting into the darkness. What
a treat it was to be cool again! And then Malta. He thought
Malta very beautiful that morning, as they came in among the
warships and liners. He bought himself a blanket and some
clothing, for all the old ones were nearly done for. And just
as a little luxury after his long privations, he bought a box of
cigars. It reminded him of the Little Brown Box.

He had letters at Malta too, from Nellie and his mother.
Mrs. Gooderich did not excel in correspondence. She said they
were getting on very well. Minnie was out a good deal — had
grand friends that Mrs. Wilfley introduced her to, and they
had a little servant. Altogether they were not doing so badly.
She never heard from Kennington now. They had their own
friends. Mrs. Gaynor had written saying she had heard from
Hiram, how they had met in Japan. That was very nice. Mrs.
Gaynor said Hiram wrote fine long letters, telling her what he
saw and all the wonderful places he visited — why didn't Hanny
do that too?

Nellie's letter didn't contain much, but it was enough. When
was he coming home? She had no idea this silly old world was
so big. Old Snickery was breaking up. The old fool would
drink himself crazy soon. The " Stormy Petrel " was doing
big business — she had no time at all. With " love from his
chatter-box " and a quaint " God bless you, dearie," at the end.

And almost before they could realise it, there was Gibraltar
" grand and grey," like a lump of England dropped down in the
Mediterranean, on the starboard bow. Well! He had seen
it; seen Singapore, seen the " far-flung battle line " of old Eng-
land. He was a man now, he thought, as he scoured and polished
the brasswork, a man with money coming to him, and a girl
waiting for him. This at least the sea had done, and he was
not dissatisfied.

They ran into the Bay and found it in a bad mood. The
sky shut down on them, and the great grey-white waves came

436 CASUALS OF THE SEA

out of the west and crashed aboard. The ship looked very bare
with all the awnings stowed away. He could hardly realise
it was winter time. Only a week or two back they had been
in the Red Sea. The water was freezing cold, the forecastle-
ports leaked, and the bogey wouldn't burn. He would squat in
the store in the engine-room for warmth, and watch the engi-
neers swaying to and fro as they did their work. And then one
morning, just as he was coming down the ladder, the engines
pulled up with a bang. He never forgot the Second's face at
that moment. He took his pipe from his mouth, and in one
glance looked at the gauges, the levers, the throttle, the fan.
He did not run wild. He just used about three seconds to
think, and then he went quietly to the fan and stopped it*
The Chief came down the ladder at once in his pyjamas, and
gave the same keen glance at the vital parts.

" Eh," he muttered, putting the telegraph to " Stop."
"Stopped dead," said the Second blankly. "Slide's bruk? "
" Get 'em all out," said Mr. Hopkins. " I'll go and tell the
Old Man."

The Third and Fourth came tumbling down as soon as Han-
nibal told them, and they began. There was no fuss, no excite-
ment, no profanity. The Caryatid rolled in the trough of the
great Atlantic waves, and it was difficult to work quickly, but
they stuck to it, silently and with infinite care and patience.
He could not help feeling proud, ridiculously proud. They were
foolish, silly men in fine weather, grumbling at everything, curs-
ing their fate, and judging many things wrong. But here, in a
pinch, by God, they were men! It took them three blistering
hours to get the broken throttle valve out and repair it. As the
last nut was screwed up, the Third began to sing, " I fear no
foe in shining armour! " and the volatile Spink made a spring for
the fan.

" Go easy now," said the Chief, wiping his face with a piece
of waste. And he looked round vaguely for a box of matches.

Up on the bridge the Mate and the Old Man steadied their
bodies to the roll and looked sombrely at the two black-balls
swaying in the wind. They felt very helpless, as sailors do
when the coffee-mill goes wrong. Mr. Hopkins had been far
from clear in his accounts of the trouble. How long? H'm!
They could search him! and he had gone down again. Their

CASUALS OF THE SEA 437

oilskins flapped about their legs as the wind rushed in wild
gusts about the chart-house. It was weary waiting.

Captain Briscoe waived breakfast and kept his place, waiting,
waiting for the telegraph. Half-past eight passed and no
sound. Overside the seas boiled and fell up against the bul-
warks in dull thuds. How slow time moved! What was the
matter down there? Eight months those engines had run with-
out a murmur, and here, almost in sight of England, something
had gone bang. Were they hiding something? Was that Chief
afraid to tell him? Fancy being towed in after being aground,
and his first voyage! But he knew in his heart that the silent
little man in charge was not likely to be afraid to tell him.
Still, why didn't they hurry? He wanted to get in and get
finished. He had something to do when he got the ship in.
He would be up against another problem. But to be towed in!
He felt he would rather . . .

And then the pointer of the telegraph whirled round as Spink
worked the handle, round and back, round and back, and then
on to " Full ahead." He answered at once, and turned to find
Mr. Cadoxton at his elbow.

" I went down below to have a look, sir," he said. " It's all
right. Mr. Hopkins says it'll take us into Liverpool."

" Cadoxton," said the Captain, " I've been twenty-eight months
in a wind-bag, and felt it less than this run."

" Yes, sir, it has been a bit of a strain. But we'll be in Liver-
pool inside of a week."

The young man looked up at the sharp, drawn face under
the sou'-wester, the fierce eyes straining into the grey weather,
the bleak crinkled nose wet with moisture. Not a bad little
chap, even if he was a bit of an outsider, don't you know. And
he began to think of Christmas in the pleasant Leicestershire
country; snow perhaps, and skating. His brother the barris-
ter would be down, and his young brother at Oxford, with his
chum; awfully jolly it would be. Such a treat to get into
one's dress clothes again. The weather? Oh, blow the weather!
This was nothing, so long as they could keep punching into it.

And Hannibal down below, he too was disdainful of the
weather. As he cleaned up the place after the battle with the
broken valve, he felt unreasonably glad that he had been there,
if only as a helper. There was something in that little tussle

488 CASUALS OF THE SEA

with the forces of nature that appealed to him. You didn't meet
men like them in warehouses and retail shops, did you? He had
watched their faces as they had toiled, faces set hard under the
grease and sweat. He heard the Second talking quietly.
" Now, Spink, don't get excited, son." Spink, the youthful
hilarious Spink, with his teeth gritted together, one sinewy hand
hanging to the grating, while his body writhed to reach a reluc-
tant and exceedingly hot nut. And the Third too, surpassing
the others in his skill in making slings and knots, producing
little steel wedges unexpectedly from his pockets at just the
right moment like a conjurer, his face an impenetrable mask of
contempt.

" It's moving/' said Spink. " Aye, like a little dog's tail,"
said the Third. " It's coming," squeaked Spink. " Aye, but
Christmas is near." And down on the plates the Chief stood
with upturned face watching them, watching the gauges, watch-
ing everything, with never a word. They knew their work,
didn't they? Well then, and sometimes, but quite casually, he
glanced at the clock.

The young man felt he had seen something worth while that
morning, something he could remember with keen pleasure. It
was not that these men feared death or that they loved the
owners, that they had done this thing so valiantly. No, there
was something deeper than that. That grey old master, the
sea, called them, and they answered. They would be paid off in
port, and be scattered abroad over the earth, never to meet again
— no matter. The sea called, and they answered. To each
other they said it was nothing. They had heard of real break-
downs, crank-shafts snapped, air-pumps gone to glory, cylinder-
heads blown out. Dreadful were the stories with which they
passed the dog-watch that night. The Third lied brazenly about
" the last ship I was in," until the Chief muttered, " Forget it !
I heard that yarn twenty years ago, and it was old then." What
a life!

What did it matter? They would be home for Christmas.

And so they were. The gale hauled off, or else they did
punch through it, everybody forgot which; and on a fine, clear
winter night, they picked up a pilot off Anglesea. Almost with
a feeling of sadness, Hannibal took his bag down to give it a
scrub. He felt all right now, though a little shaky on his pins,
as he told the Chief. Even the cloddish occupants of the fore-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 439

castle were bestirring themselves. Men got out stubby pencils
and figured on old magazines the possible total of pay, forgetting
to allow for all little advances — the ten pesetas in Las Palmas,
the two dollars in New York, the twenty yen in Kobe, the five
guilders in Sourabaja. But Mr. Cadoxton, sitting in the cabin
surrounded by documents, did not forget them, and it was won-
derful, when they were added up, how much there was to come
off the total.

Fog held them in the river, a dripping low-lying bank so
thick you could not see your hand before your face. All around
them sirens screamed and whistles bellowed, and sometimes a
ghostly ship came perilously close, the thump of her propeller
sounding with startling distinctness for a moment. Hannibal
sat on the warm fiddle-grating, and looked out. Fog? He
laughed at the idea. He had been brought up to call this white
cotton-woolly stuff mist. Fog, to his metropolitan consciousness,
was different. How homelike it was, though, after the burning
crystalline East, after the interminable days of shining blue
water. It seemed like a beautiful, dreadful, unforgettable
dream, a dream from which he was returning, through a sleepy
phantasmal fog, to real life again. Beyond that vaporous mys-
tery lay Nellie and warm fires, home, love, long mornings in bed.
After all, he was tired.

And once or twice he coughed huskily.

At length, after much waiting and manoeuvring, after long
hooting and ringing of bells, they came into the dock. It was
morning, and tiie mists had rolled away.

Beyond the river wall lay a huge liner at anchor, her great
funnels reared up against the sky-line. For a moment Hannibal
forgot the imminence of his departure, forgot the insistent calls
to come ashore and have a drink. He leaned over the bulwarks
and stared at the broad stream and the steamer. How he loved
tli- in, those splendid runners of the sea! Men lived there, toiled
and rejoiced, cursed and did their work. And the old out-classed
steamers laid up alongside — he loved them too, unkempt, rusty,
and bluff-bosomed though they were. They were casuals of the
sea, going blindly as the markets bade them up and down,
across and across, so they fetched and carried to feed the roaring
looms and busy mills of all the lands. And when no hand was
lifted, no charter signed, they lay there silently, patiently, in
one side, paying no heed as tides ebbed and flowed, claiming

440 CASUALS OF THE SEA

humbly but space in which to rest, their masts flaunting no
joyous ensign to affright the spirit of decay that crept up the
river on the dripping fog.

" Hi, man ! Get yourself ready. They pay off at ten o'clock,"
called a voice from the forecastle door.

" I'm coming," he replied, turning. The voyage was over at
last.

XXIII

A SHIPPING office is a region given over to the com-
monplace. Inside of the heavily-latched doors you
are out of the hearing of the great happenings of the
sea. On those distempered walls of ashen grey are
pinned curt notices of trumpery court-cases, fines for over-load-
ing, imprisonments for falsifying discharges, nagging circulars
or recommendations, illegible lists of bygone salvage crews, pa-
thetic appeals for seamen's homes. Behind the broad mahogany
sit disdainful young men in immaculate raiment, industrious,
distant, and incredibly skilful with the pen. There is some-
thing of the workhouse office about it all, with its bleak cleanli-
ness, its chilling silences, its penetrating odour of documents, its
dry disregard of the souls of men.

At eleven o'clock Captain Briscoe walked into the discharging
room quickly, a brown leather bag hanging heavily from his hand,
and lifting the hinged leaf in the end of the counter, went round
behind. A clerk looked up from his writing and nodded good
morning, which the Captain returned, setting his hat and um-
brella in a corner. Seating himself at the corner he opened his
bag with a curious air of preoccupation. He took out the ship's
papers, set them to one side, and spread before him a crumpled
telegram.

In twos and threes the crew sidled shyly into the space before
him, their boots ringing on the clean bare floor. Gradually they
separated into little groups, sailor seeking sailor, fireman fire-
man; the engineers standing aloof at the far end, their bowler
hats held decorously against their chins. Mr. Hopkins, for-
bidden by the law to smoke, stood with his left hand in his
overcoat pocket as though feeling for matches, his untidy mous-
tache drooping, profoundly depressed. The Third stood with
his back to the others, reading without emotion a notice which
mentioned that if he, Eustace Richard Titheradge, applied to
the offices of the Board of Trade, or any shipping office in the
United Kingdom, he would be put in possession of a bronze

441

442 CASUALS OF THE SEA

medal due to him as one of the crew of the steamer Pharos, who
had rescued the crew of the Norwegian barque Ingeborg in the
Bay of Biscay, six years before. Having read it, he turned and
surveyed the crew of the Caryatid with a blank stare. Tommy,
his round cherubic face appearing above the grey muffler, leaned
on the radiator and studied a slip of paper — his account of
wages. Hannibal stood beside him nibbling the edge of his
tweed cap, and watching the Old Man.

The door opened again and admitted Mr. Cadoxton. Mr.
Cadoxton did not remove his hat like the rest of the crew. He
betrayed no sign of being overawed by the atmosphere of the
place. He walked quickly to the leaf, ducked under it, and
appeared beside Captain Briscoe. From his pocket he drew a
gloved hand containing a bank envelope. The Captain closed
his hand on the telegram, crushed it up and put it in his pocket.
Every now and again the door would open and a strange face
would peer round the room, only to withdraw hastily.

Captain Briscoe laid a thick wad of bank-notes on the counter,
and poured the bag of silver and gold upon them. Hannibal
looked at the money curiously. It was the first time he had
ever seen hundreds of pounds. He tried to imagine how it had
come there. By what magic was the skipper, coming up out of
the fog of the river, out of the great sea spaces, able to persuade
these shore-people that he was the rightful steward of all that
money? It was very marvellous. Only a few hours ago, you
might say, they were down there in the Irish Sea, and here, with
the speed of a fairy tale, gold appeared, the gold for which they
had toiled so long. He looked at the wages list. He was to
receive as a final balance thirty-two pounds. He felt suddenly
timid as he tried to realise the immensity of the sum. He
would have to put it in a safe place — he might be robbed. He
wanted to be rid of it before he had received it. He had heard
stories in the forecastle of men who had met friends outside the
shipping office. As he nibbled his cap he heard his name called
by Mr. Cadoxton, and stepped forward. All around him men
stood with heads bent over curved palms making hasty calcula-
tions. The clerk swung the articles around and pointed to the
place where he was to sign. Mr. Cadoxton peeled off six bank-
notes, selected some loose gold and silver from the heap, and
pushed them towards him. There was a whispered conversa-
tion between the clerk and the Captain.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 443

"Wait/' said the latter. "Wait for your discharge-book.
Go and get measured. Over there."

Hannibal turned uncertainly, and the beaming Tommy pointed
to a blue-uniformed officer who was beckoning him to the wall.
Hannibal went over and stood with his back against a graduated
pillar, and the official slid the gauge down until it touched his
head. Five feet eight. He smiled sheepishly as he caught the
eye of Spink. He saw them pass up one by one and sign the
paper. By that delicate reversion of precedence affected by
ships' articles, Mr. Hopkins appeared last. Hannibal, looking
at him, had a sudden conviction that the whole business was a
dream. That drooping, untidy little man with his sagging over-
coat, his green neck-tie up over his collar, his ill-kept nails, his
expression of hopeless melancholy — was he the man who had
been his boss for so long? Hannibal stared at him, as he grasped
the pen to sign against ninety-four pounds seven and a penny,
and saw his left hand come out of his pocket holding a paper
parcel.

" Here," said Mr. Hopkins to the Captain, " want it now ? "

For a moment the Old Man looked blank. And then he re-
membered. He put out his hand.

" Thank you, Chief," he said clearly. " Much obliged."

Mr. Cadoxton's eyes strove to appear unconcerned. When
the shiny blue discharge-book had been made out and handed
to him, and Hannibal turned to go, he found the place empty,
save for the official who had measured him. He opened the
door to go out into the chill wind that blew around the corner.
He felt lonely, and strange. And there was the money.

" Why don't you put it in the bank? " asked the man in the
blue uniform, as though reading his thoughts.

" 'Ere? " asked Hannibal, and the man nodded. " Come this
way," he said, and led the young man into another room with
brass railings over the counter. In a few minutes he had made
out a form which would entitle him to draw his money in
Swansea.

"Keep the two pounds odd," suggested the official; "you'll
have to pay your fare."

" Of course," laughed Hannibal. " I forgot that." He put
the warrant in his pocket and went out again.

" Dirty weather," he remarked. " How do you get to the
station from 'ere ? "

444 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Car at the top of the street. Take a Lime Street car/* said
the man.

" Thanks. Oh ! 'ere's the Old Man ! "

Captain Briscoe, accompanied by Mr. Cadoxton, came out,
putting up their coat-collars.

" Tell the Mate I'll be back for dinner," said he to the Third
Mate. " Here, Gooderich, come with me."

Somewhat amazed, Hannibal found himself hurrying up the
road beside Captain Briscoe.

" Understand," said the Captain, " you can't come back in
the ship."

" I'm going to Swansea, sir," he replied quickly.

" There's no need to sir me now. You are off the articles,
and your sister is my wife."

" I can't imagine it," said Hannibal, coughing. " But then
I don't know her very well."

"Do you know where we are going?" demanded the Cap-
tain.

" No idea," said Hannibal. The Captain took the crumpled
telegram from his pocket and handed it to him. His unaccus-
tomed eyes wandered over the carboned scrawl.

" Staying Mason's Hotel. Saw Caryatid due this morning.
Minnie."

" Why," he exclaimed, " she's here, then ! "

" We are going there now," said the Captain.

"Me!"

" Yes, you. We've got to get acquainted. On the ship —
impossible — discipline against it — Understand ? "

They swung up on a tramcar going up Church Street. Han-
nibal felt troubled about this business. He resented being
dragged into other people's affairs.

" I want to get a train to Swansea," he mentioned.

"What for? Get another ship?"

" No, sir — I mean — I got a girl there."

" That so ? Thought you'd be going home for Christmas."

" It's going to be home for me," he returned.

"Well, I'll show you — get a time-table at the hotel. You
see, I must see the wife first thing."

"But why me?" quavered Hannibal fretfully. "I don't
know 'er as well as you do. She's always been on 'cr own.
It's nothing to do with me, anyway. My relations never done

CASUALS OF THE SEA 445

me any good. I'm going my own road." And he looked som-
brely out of the streaming windows of the car.

" I was wondering whether you had quarrelled. The wife
never mentioning you, you see," said Captain Briscoe.

"We ain't quarrelled," he insisted. "We've just gone our
own roads, that's all."

He could not explain the lack of sympathy between himself
and the rest of his family. It was one of those subtle things
that are always overstated in words. And indeed, how could
he, the untutored young man, give expression to the distinction
between Minnie's fastidiously unconventional mind and his own
simple appreciation of life and love? How could he be expected
to see any resemblance, any common origin, of Minnie's absence
from home and his own sudden desire to get to sea? He felt
oppressed by the weight of the problems confronting him. It
was like the fog in the river. He wanted to get away to Nellie.

A sudden exhilaration came to him as he thought of her. She
would look after him. With her he would be safe.

Captain Briscoe sat watching the streets as they went on.
Mason's Hotel was temperance, and he knew where it was.
Had she come on alone? That would be foolish. Hotels did
not like solitary women. He had had no idea, when he fore-
cast a probable date of arrival, that she would come to him so
quickly. Was she in trouble? His lips worked under his beard
as he tried to take a view of the whole question. It was a little
big for him. Out on the ocean, he had seen it as a frightful
morass in which lie was staggering, lifting a foot only to plunge
it afresh in the downward-sucking ooze, while above his soul a
dark sky hung, thick with red stars. But here in the City the
problem was more difficult, though less terrifying. As he pon-
dered he became dimly aware that the solution lay in his wife's
future integrity and his own courage. He had undertaken a
colossal task when he married her. He saw that now. He saw
that the walls of convention are low within, but terribly steep
and high without. Perhaps that was why it was so easy for the
folk within to look down on you.

He stood up quickly and beckoned to Hannibal. They
alighted and hurried through the rain, up a side street.

" Here you are," he said, stopping before a yellow stuccoed
front witli Mason's Temperance Hotel in thick gilt letters across
the first floor wall.

446 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" I'll go up first," he said as they entered the narrow hall-
way. "You understand? It will be better if I go up first,"
and he went forward to meet the thin woman in black who was
coming down the stairs.

" Mrs. Briscoe ? Come this way, sir, if you please." Hanni-
bal watched them round the curve of the stairs. A faint smell
of meat cooking came to him, the clink of cutlery and the
murmur of voices. On the wall was a faded oil-painting of a
sailing-ship in a dingy gold frame. Some one had poked an
umbrella through the spanker. How dreary it was, after the
splendour of the East! The shiny varnished paper, the woven
carpet, the monotonous ticking of the clock in the sitting-room
behind him brought home to him the fact that the life of England
was closing round him once more. Well! he shifted his feet
cautiously, and coughed. When he got to Swansea he would be
all right. Nellie was waiting for him. Perhaps he ought to
have sent a telegram. He would do that as soon as he could.
What was going on up there? Why did they not send for
him?

He felt curiously ill at ease at the prospect of meeting Min-
nie again. He had grown since leaving London, his knowledge
of the world had spread over the surface of his mind, until it
had reached his sister. And she was the Old Man's wife. She
was to be spoken of as Mrs. Briscoe. And she was upstairs. He
heard footsteps.

"Hanny!"

He went forward blindly to meet his mother, took her in his
arms and kissed her cheek.

" Well, old lady ! I didn't know — you come with Minnie ! "

" Good gracious ! "

She pushed him back a little to look at him.

" You're a man ! " she said solemnly, and touched the black
hair on his lip — his own gesture. He laughed.

" Sure thing, old lady. Here I am, you see."

" You'll come up now ? "

" Is she up there ? " He raised his eyebrows to indicate
upstairs.

" Yes, of course. And George — Captain Briscoe too."

Mary Gooderich had changed once again since we saw her
last in that house in Jubilee Street. She would have said per-
haps that she scarcely knew herself, for this time the change

CASUALS OF THE SEA 447

was in another direction. The cringe was gone from her gait,
and in her gestures was a certain freedom, a certain air of
vague authority. And she called the Old Man George. To
Hannibal it was a revelation of his mother. It is certainly
wonderful how adaptable a human being, especially a woman,
is to environment. When you have left Jubilee Street for a
flat in Tedworth Square, with a servant, even if she be only
a little one, when your daughter is married to a sea-captain and
travels to Liverpool to meet him, staying at hotels, your atti-
tude towards the world becomes less strained. Your regard
for the Browns may even become humorously indifferent.

Like many people of limited intellect, Mrs. Gooderich had been
borne down by facts. Apparently every fact she encountered
was on Minnie's side, the fact of the monthly note cashed in
Billiter Lane, the fact of the flat with its furniture, its linen, its
gracious labour-saving contrivances, its capable servant. There
was the undeniable fact too, of Minnie's acquaintances. Surely,
if her daughter were a bad girl, good kind ladies like Mrs.
Wilfley would not associate with her, distinguished men like Sir
Anthony Gilfillan, m.p., would not exert themselves on her be-
half, when she joined that foolish petition business down at
Westminster? And behind all these was the signed bald state-
ment that George Briscoe, master mariner and bachelor, was
married to Wilhelmina Gooderich, spinster, at the Town Hall,
King's Road, Chelsea. The sight of that plain sheet of paper
had recalled the past with a painful vividness. She remem-
bered her sudden choice of the name Wilhelmina, when she read
of the queen-baby across the Channel — a foolish piece of senti-
ment that her husband had capped by naming their youngest
after a horse. Mr. Gooderich had won four pounds on " Han-
nibal " that week and the money had been welcome. She could
look back at that time now without a shudder. Somehow, in
a manner so complex she could not follow it, she had emerged;
her dream of an old age unspoiled by care was come partly true.
She avoided the dark thoughts of her life and held firmly to
the facts. It was a great comfort to have really good clothes
to wear.

Hannibal followed her upstairs. Perhaps it was as well he
had come. After all, he had no quarrel with any one. He
blushed as he thought how he had hugged his mother. He had
gone not for to do it. He had never done it before. Fancy !

448 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Mrs. Gooderich led the way along the dark corridor to a
room with a ground glass door at the end.

Captain Briscoe was standing by the fire looking down at
his wife. He turned as mother and son came into the room.

" Here he is," said Mrs. Gooderich. " Take your coat off,
Hanny. It's all wet."

He hung his cap on a peg by the door, and shouldered him-
self out of his coat. As he fumbled for the loop he heard a
voice say as though amused:

" Why, is that Hanny ? Good heavens ! "

He turned with a certain aggression in his manner, which
was defeated by a short fit of coughing. And then he saw his
sister sitting by the fire, a rug thrown over her and tucked under
her arms. Her face was pale, as always, and her hands lay
with fingers loosely interlaced on the dark fabric of the rug.
She smiled as her brother came up to her. How disconcerting
she was! Captain Briscoe looked at Hannibal's doubtful face
with a certain sympathy. He too had been taken back by the
smiling figure in the chair. He, like Hannibal, had braced him-
self for a definite situation, and she had scored again in her
inimitable way. You cannot be aggressive with a woman hud-
dled in a rug. Try it.

She held up her hand, still smiling.

" Well, Hanny," she said kindly, " did they put you on the
fires? You look as though you had been put somewhere. Look
at him, mother. He's thin as an umbrella."

He stood by her chair, looking down at her, smiling awk-
wardly. Young men dislike public references to their personal
appearance. Mrs. Gooderich looked at him solicitously.

" He is thin. I suppose it was that illness."

" He had a touch of fever," said Captain Briscoe. " I looked
after him."

"And how do you like it? " said Minnie.

Hannibal, as he answered, was conscious of a feeling of amaze-
ment at her kindly peremptory tone. She spoke like a lady of
position. He was sure she would patronise Mrs. Hopkins.
There might be sparks flying, wigs on the green, no doubt; but
that would be her attitude.

" I like it all right," he said quietly. " But I'm for the beach
for a while now."

" For what? Talk English, Hanny."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 449

N I mean," he said, " I'm going to stay ashore a bit."

" I see. I suppose you'll be coming to town to stay with us ? "
There was a faint sarcasm in the tone and he caught it.

" No, I ain't," he returned. " I'm going to Swansea to get
married."

For a moment she studied his thin features as the firelight
played upon them, his solemn brown eyes gazing into the glow-
ing coals. It was a facer for her, for all of them. How could
he have been so secretive? Mrs. Gooderich could hardly believe
her ears. After throwing over Amelia, here he was after all —
but Swansea ! For a moment no one spoke, and he stood motion-
less, unconscious of the mild sensation he had caused. Minnie
pursed her lips slightly.

* You ! " she said at length.

" That's right," he replied evenly. " What of it? "

" Who is it, Hanny ? " asked his mother anxiously.

" Girl in Swansea," he said. " We got engaged when I was
there."

He was master of himself now, realising the tremendous ad-
vantage he had over his sister. She couldn't get past that, mar-
ried a*s she was. He caught her eye for a fleeting moment and
saw it flicker involuntarily.

"And you won't be coming to London?" said his mother.

" Perhaps, later on," he replied. "I — I want a time-table,"
he added, looking at one that hung on the wall.

" Well," said Captain Briscoe, handing it to him, " you don't
seem very anxious to tell us much about it."

" There ain't much to tell," he returned simply. " There's
no need to worry about me," he coughed. " I'm all right."

" You've got a cold," said his mother.

" log," he croaked, turning the leaves of the time-table.
" I'll be all right soon." He looked round for a chair to sit
down. " Here's one to Cardiff," he said without looking up.
94 Two-twenty. That'll do me."" And he shut the book and laid
it on the table. For a moment he stared at the fire.

" I thought," said his mother, a little uncertainly, " you'd
be coming to London for Christmas." And she looked at her
daughter, who gave no sign that she had heard.

" She'll be waiting," he replied, and stood up. Suddenly he
looked at his sister. " What's the matter? " he demanded.

Minnie looked down at her hands. Mrs. Gooderich fidgetted,

450 CASUALS OF THE SEA

Captain Briscoe smiled. Hannibal glanced from face to face,
and his own cleared.

" Oh," he said. " Well, I'll 'ave to get down to the ship for
my dunnage. I'll 'ave to say Toodle-oo."

Minnie held out her hand, but made no offer to kiss him.

" Good-bye, Hanny," she said. " Come and see us some time,
when you are a married man."

" I dare say," he answered. " Good-bye, sir." He checked
himself and laughed. " I'd never get out of the 'abit," he
said.

" It's a good fault," said Captain Briscoe. " Minnie, my dear,
I've just this to say for this young chap. He's done his work,
and kept his place, and I've had no fault to find whatever. I
wish him luck. Pity there isn't more like him." And he shook
hands. " Good-bye, young man," he said.

Mrs. Gooderich went to the door to go downstairs with her
son, helping him into his coat. He turned at the door, cap in
hand.

" I'm glad," he said in a low voice, " glad it's turned out
better than you thought. Good-bye." And he left them.

" Hanny," said his mother, when they reached the dreary
passage again. "What's her name, dear? I'm so glad!"

"Nellie, mother, Nellie Ffitt. "I'd like" — he paused and
looked round — " I'd like you to see 'er some day, when we get
spliced."

" And are you going on the ship again? "

" I couldn't say. I may. I'll write to you, old lady."

"Do, dear. Isn't it rainin'?"

"Ah, rotten weather," he coughed again. " I'm breaking up,"
he joked. " Good-bye." He kissed her again with his arm
around her. " You all right — with Minnie ? "

" Oh yes, we're very comfortable. Now mind you write."

" Sure."

And he was gone.

Mrs. Gooderich went slowly upstairs, a finger pressed into
her cheek. She felt a pang, no doubt, at the young man's curt
dismissal of them and their interests. She could not help shar-
ing her daughter's temporary dismay when he dumbfounded
them by the announcement of his departure for Swansea, for
she had gone over to Minnie, she feared, irrevocably. There
were the facts. Here was Captain Briscoe himself, an irre-

CASUALS OF THE SEA 451

fragable if baffling fact, talking about living in the country. She
re-entered the room.

" I was saying," said he, setting a chair and hanging up the
time-table, " that it was always a hope with me to live in the
country."

" And I was saying, mother," cut in Minnie placidly, " that
George doesn't seem to realise that it's us who have to live in
the country, not him. You'll be away all the time," she said to
him. " You won't have the trouble with leaky roofs and broken
windows. And do you think the girl will live in the country?
Not likely. You ask her!"

"Well, Minnie, you can get a girl who belongs, can't you?"
Captain Briscoe was not impressive away from his ship.

" There's another thing," Minnie went on, spreading her
hands on the rug and examining the nails. " I want to take
up my work again when this business is over." She indicated
her condition with a faint gesture. " It's awfully fascinating,"
she added, looking up at him.

" Writing advertisements ? " he muttered, and she nodded.
He was quite surprised at this extraordinary development of his
wife's character. Think of it! It had never entered his head
that advertisements were written, and here was his own wife
calling it fascinating, giving him perfectly incredible particulars
of the money to be earned by it. Mrs. Wilfley made her twenty
pounds a week out of it. And it was refined, lady-like work
too, a branch of literature, you might say.

" Writing advertisements ? " he muttered, and she nodded.

" Couldn't you do that in the country ? " he asked. She shook
her head with a smile.

" One has to be in the heart of things to get the human
touch," she replied, and I defy any one to have told whether
Minnie was quoting unconsciously, quoting sincerely, or quoting
ironically. Her placid face told nothing.

" George," said Mrs. Gooderich — here was another phenom-
enal thing, this diminutive, neatly-dressed mother-in-law address-
ing him as George — " you're exciting her. She's tired by the
long railway journey."

Minnie said "Rubbish!" but Captain Briscoe sprang to his
feet and looked at his watch.

" I must go down to the ship," he said. " I want to see the
Mate and Chief about dry-docking. I'll be back soon. I'm

452 CASUALS OF THE SEA

sorry you won't be able to come down and see the ship this time.
She's in fine trim."

" Is she ? " she answered indifferently. " Is that anything
extraordinary? You might bring me the Morning Post as you
come back. It wasn't in when mother went for it this morning."

" Yes, all right. I'll bring it. I shan't be long."

He put on his coat and hurried out. He was particularly
anxious to see the Mate at once. Mr. Hutchins was keen on
promotion. Some one might come down to the ship.

" I wonder," said Minnie as her mother took up a piece of linen
which she was sewing, " I wonder if he will remember to get it."

" You forgot to ask him about the name," said Mrs. Goode-
rich.

" Did I ? No, I don't think I forgot, mother. When he
came in I got an idea it would be better to leave it."

" It would be nice if you called him Hanny," began Mrs.
Gooderich, smiling and biting her thread.

" I would call him anything in the world but Hanny ! " said
Minnie, with a touch of viciousness in her voice. " How can
one tell if it will be a boy? I hope so, of course. I don't want
a girl. If it is a boy — .well, I've another idea."

" You have so many, Minnie — I can't keep up with you."

" I shall ask Anthony Gilfillan to be his godfather," said
Minnie.

" That gentleman ! Do you know him well enough ? "

" I think so," replied her daughter. " I saw a lot of him at
one time, when he wasn't so well known. And Anthony's a good
enough name, mother."

" But George might " began Mrs. Gooderich.

" George has enough to bother about without that," inter-
rupted Minnie. " You didn't hear, though — you were down-
stairs. He's in some trouble or other about his ship now. ' Put
her aground,' he calls it, and there's to be an enquiry. He talks
of losing his command." For a few moments she gazed into the
fire, a contemptuous expression on her face, her hands moving
under the rug. " I should have thought," she broke out, " that
the sea was big enough. And he's been at it long enough. It'll
be a nice thing if he can't get another job and I have to earn
money for two — three — four. Eh ? "

Her mother looked at her in astonishment. Minnie's face was
no longer merely contemptuous, it was triumphant. To the elder

CASUALS OF THE SEA 453

woman's consternation she withdrew her hand from the rug and
showed a gleaming blue-black revolver.

" Oh ! " said Mrs. Gooderich, and recoiled.

" He gave me this," said Minnie, regarding it with some
amusement, " to keep. He dare not trust himself until he has
heard what they are going to do. Fancy ! "

For some time there was a silence. Slowly the girl hid the
thing under the rug again, staring into the fire.

" Mother ! " she rapped at length, and her mother started.

"Yes, Minnie?"

"Mother, I was just thinking. What fools men are! What
utter fools! But, oh mother, dear mother, what fools we are,
not to find it out — sooner ! "

XXIV

IT was to him a physically fatiguing journey, for he was
but little accustomed to trains. To the seafarer, the
monotonous confinement, the crepitating vibration of the
wheels at unknown and unfriendly junctions, the noxious
yet draughty atmosphere and the never-ending readjustment of
the body to a fresh cramp, make up a familiar and dreaded
memory. To him, moreover, with his body shaken by weakness,
it followed upon a sleepless night and a morning of variegated
mental excitement. As he changed for the last time, and after
a weary wait, into the local train at Cardiff, he wondered if it
wouldn't have been easier, and almost quicker, to have gone
round by sea. Tommy had told him how he had travelled
from Glasgow to Liverpool and from Leith to London in
coasters. Very cheap, Tommy pronounced it, and cheapness
with Tommy was a cardinal virtue. Funny little chap, Hanni-
bal thought dreamily, as the locomotive bunted into the train
with a crash. He was clever too. Look how he signalled in
German to that ship in the Mediterranean, just after leaving
Malta ! No doubt about him getting on. And, why, if it hadn't
been for him, there would have been no Nellie! Just think!

He thought affectionately of every one on the ship. Strange,
surely, they should be all flung apart now. He wondered if he
would ever see any of them again. There was Spink, the hilar-
ious Spink, gone to Shields to get his ticket. Not a bad young
chap. Hannibal remembered little gifts of soap and matches,
old magazines and plugs of tobacco — the Spartan luxuries of
the sea. The Third too! He was a cough drop, he was! No
soap and matches from him; he never had any of his own. For
the Second, Hannibal had a species of awe. He had the wit
to see how completely the smooth running of all the complex
mechanism of " below " depended upon that taciturn, tireless
man's labour and care. True, behind him was another yet more
taciturn, but it was not likely that Hannibal should see how
essential to the Second's peace of mind was the silent, invisible
integrity of the Chief. A good fellow, Mr. Hopkins. He would

454

CASUALS OF THE SEA 455

like to have seen Mrs. Hopkins again. She understood him.
Well, perhaps he would; Penarth was close here, somewhere.

And that led him back to Nellie. Would she be at the sta-
tion? He had accomplished the unprecedented feat of sending
a telegram to tell her he would arrive at five minutes to eight.
The mere thought of her gave him a warm glow. Somehow he
felt no alarm now at the prospect of settling down. He was
tired of roaming. To his youthful imagination, so long turned
inward, so recently stimulated, it seemed to him he had lived
through a whole lifetime of vivid experience since Captain Bris-
coe had entered the shop that day to buy some tobacco. That
day! The day of his emancipation. As he leaned back in the
corner with closed eyes he searched his mind in vain for any
regret at leaving Amelia. And then a thrill of pleasure fol-
lowed. His mother was clear of those Browns too. He had
been on the defensive with Minnie, but he was glad indeed that
his mother was shut o' those Browns. Of course, she was under
Minnie's thumb, as was Captain Briscoe. Fancy! The Old
Man under Minnie's thumb! He found himself pitying him.
But then, and he looked at the matter from a personal point of
view, perhaps the Old Man liked to be under her thumb, if he
loved her, same as he, Hannibal, turned instinctively to Nellie
for strength. That might be it. Anyway, it was no business of
his. And he thought with a lazy, delightful satisfaction of the
thirty pounds waiting for him in Swansea. . . . Quite a fortune !

He was nearly asleep as the train picked its slow way round
from Landore into the town that lies behind those huge bul-
warks of coal-streaked rock, yet open to the western rain-laden
winds, open to her friend the sea. The lights of the approach,
the clatter of the wheels over switches, roused him. As he but-
toned his coat up closely he looked out of the window. The train
glided into the station and he was conscious of a pause within
himself, a momentary doubt. It occurred to him that, so astound-
ing had been his life recently, it would not be surprising if the
whole thing turned out to be a dream. He often had this obses-
sion, this slack grasp on reality. As he stood up in the dark-
ness of the dimly-lit carriage it came upon him. What was it
all, this curiously-coloured, inconsequent thing called life? How
did you account for all these contorted shining images in his
brain — the East — ship — fog — Minnie — thirty pounds —
Little Brown Box — railway train — bump ! The door flew open

456 CASUALS OF THE SEA

at the touch of a porter's hand, and he stepped carefully upon
the platform, feeling dizzy and stiff. And then, in the midst
of strange, half-seen figures he singled her out coming towards
him, waving hastily, gladly.

He saw her expression change as though she were half afraid
of his welcome, her full, pink, pretty face set in a frame of dark
fur. They met, really, almost in absence of mind. He was
thinking, " I saw her here first of all ! " and she was thinking,
" He's got a moustache ! "

" I'm back," he said, laughing sheepishly, as he took her hand.
"Nellie!"

For a moment she was silent, merely nodding and smiling as
she looked him over. His big brown eyes roved over the sta-
tion, came back to hers, and he laughed again. She came to her-
self.

"Goodness! you do look ill! I got your telegram, just as I
was having a cup of tea. My sister-in-law's living with me now,
and we always have tea at three. So you have come back!
Where's your things — in the van ? No, this end always, with
Cardiff trains."

They turned as his canvas bag, corpulent with bedding, shot
upon the platform.

" There it is," he said. " I'll go and get it." She caught his
sleeve.

" Let the porter fetch it. I'll tell him." She told him, and
they went out to the street. There she paused in her prattle,
looking searchingly into his face. He coughed.

M You mustn't get cold," she announced, and walked towards
a cab. Like a man still in a dream, he got in, heard her say,
"• Stormy Petrel," felt her sitting beside him, inhaled the scent
of her clothes.

" Blow the expense ! " he laughed. She turned on him, her
face glowing. -•

" Didn't you get my letters in Malta ? " she demanded.

" One," he said.

" I sent another three days after. Old Snickery fell down
the cellar and broke his neck ! "

" Lummy ! "

" So you see, but perhaps you don't " she began.

"See what, Nellie?"

" Why, I had the license, that's all." And she took her lower

CASUALS OF THE SEA 457

lip in her teeth and smiled into his eyes. She saw he did not
understand.

" The ' Stormy Petrel ' is mine now," she added.

" Yours! " he croaked. " For good? "

" Just that and nothing else. They went to law about it,
old Snickery's nephews and nieces, but they lost."

" And you're — the landlady ? "

She nodded.

" And you come to meet me, and take a cab ? " he faltered.

She nodded again, smiling.

"Why not, Hanny? I'm no different, am I, from before?"

" The landlady ! " he reflected, as though afraid. " Why," he
broke out, " you've got property, then."

" That's what I'm telling you," she answered with gentle im-
patience. " It isn't a crime to have property, is it? You aren't
one of those socialists ? "

" Me? No, I ain't anything, only a chap who's been to sea.
D'you mean to say," he went on, "we're still engaged? You

with property an' me with — with " And he stopped as

the cab halted at the kerb.

" Come on," she said. " May's waiting to see you. Come
on ! "

He glanced up at the house before entering it. The door of
the bar was swinging even as he looked. Electric lights inside
showed a glittering array of bottles, polished wood casks, nickel-
plated ware, glasses in rows, all festooned with holly and red
berries. He followed her into the hall-way upstairs and into
a room over the bar, a room with a big fire and a table spread
for supper.

" Here he is, May," he heard Miss Ffitt say, and saw a lady
turn from a glass where she had been touching her hair.

"Mrs. Lloyd — Mr. Gooderich," said Miss Ffitt, introducing
them. " I just got to the station in time, dear. He didn't get
my letter about — you know. I've just been telling him."

Mrs. Lloyd was a lady with a certain gentility that did not
preclude good nature. She smiled and shook hands heartily,
and seemed disposed to leave the talking to Miss Ffitt.

I've heard of you," she said graciously, and busied herself
with the table.

" I don't understand now," said Hannibal, sitting down after
removing his coat. " It's like a fairy tale."

458 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" That's all it would have been if I hadn't stuck to my
rights. Now I'll just run down and see how things are going
on. I won't be a minute.'* And going out she gave him a pat
on his shoulder.

" Fancy ! " he muttered, looking at the fire. He heard Mrs.
Lloyd ask him if he had had a good voyage, heard himself
answer politely, but he was far away in dreamland all the time.
Surely, he thought, it would all vanish, and he would find him-
self on the soap-box in the forecastle, looking up at Angelatos'
big feet or listening to Jan's commentary upon life. He strove
to figure himself as a man of property. He remembered the
awe in which Amelia spoke of such people. He wondered what
they would think. Lummy! He would be able to talk to
them now! He would be able to snap his fingers at Uncle
George and all the rest of 'em. Buy up the Little Brown
Box, eh? Not that he wanted it. Swansea was good enough for
him!

But was it true? A troubled look crept over his face. Had
he the nerve to ask her to marry him now she was in such a
different position? Why, there must be scores after her, men
of property, perhaps. Why should she take to him so? And
he remembered that, in a way, women did take to him. Amelia
had done so, as had Mrs. Hopkins. Was it possible that there
was something about him he didn't know what?

Miss Ffitt came back. In her plain black dress that fitted her
figure and made her seem slim, she was the image of a capable
landlady — not too old. Indeed, the black dress, contrasting her
pink face and light brown hair, made her look younger and less
blowzy than her favourite pink would have done.

" Now we'll have supper," she announced, smiling. " And
you'll tell us all about your travels."

" No fear," he said. " You've got to tell me all about this
business of the house. I can't believe it. 'Course I believe you,"
he added, as he drew up his chair. " But what I mean it, it's
so unexpected like."

" Of course it is, dear, but we can get used to anything if we
try, even a bit of good luck. The great thing is to see it when it
comes and take your chance. I wasn't thinking of anything like
this happening when I first took over the license. It was simply
a matter of business, me taking out the license and acting as
Mr. Snickery's manager. Why, do you know, even when he

CASUALS OF THE SEA 459

was dead I went to a lawyer, Mr. Leese, who said I had what
he called a technical right to the place. 'What's that? ' I said.
And he said it might need a lawsuit to substantiate the claim,
and he would take it up for me if I liked. I hadn't anything
to lose, you see, so I told him to do it. Did it very well, too,
and only charged a hundred pounds altogether. Wasn't I glad
I hadn't given it up as they asked me to the day after the old
chap was buried ? "

" What I said was," said Mrs. Lloyd, " that Nellie having
really made the business what it is, she had a moral right to it,
anyway. Don't you think so ? "

"And then," broke in Miss Ffitt, "what do you think?
Those nephews of his tried to take my character away. Began
to tell people I'd been their uncle's kept woman, and I'd wheedled
it out of him. Mr. Leese wanted me to let him take that up.
He said he'd get five hundred out of them for defamation of
character. But I didn't want to do that. I let him write to
them and threaten proceedings if they didn't apologise, as he
had six witnesses. They did too, so that's over. Kept woman
indeed! I'd be hard up for a new dress, I can tell you, before
I had anything to do with a poor rickety old boozer like
Snickery ! "

" What a lot's been happening while I' been away," said
Hannibal.

" I should think so ! Let's see, it's eight months nearly,
though I thought, after you wrote from Japan, you'd been lost,
it was such a long time before another letter came."

" I was bad," he returned, passing his plate for more ham.
" And we were ashore on a coral reef. I woke up and found the
ship all on one side."

" Fancy ! Do tell us all about it."

He told them, growing descriptive as he warmed to his sub-
ject. Perhaps he drew his own figure a little large in the pic-
ture, perhaps the unaccustomed stimulus of an attentive and
easily astonished feminine audience led him to paint the dangers
of sea life somewhat luridly. It is a very easy sin to commit,
for though most women are too shrewd and too practical to
believe the preposterous for long, yet they do actually believe
anything at the time of the telling, and make you feel they
believe it too, which is very charming and delightful, when you
are young and just off a ship.

460 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" And what are you going to do now ? " enquired Mrs. Lloyd,
as they pushed their chairs back from the table.

" Me? I'm going to ask a young lady I know if she's thinking
o* getting married," he replied, a fine courage in his brown eye.
" You see," he added as he put his arm round Nellie's waist,
" I'm like Nellie with the lawyer. I didn't reckon what I was
in for. But the great thing is to see good luck when it comes,
eh? And you don't get much — if you don't ask."

XXV

NOT for many months did he arrive at any sort of
ordered comprehension of the things that had befallen
him. Indeed, I fancy that just as he had passed his
childhood in fantastic dreaming, as he had roamed
with East-End gamins without much contamination of soul, as
he had gone among the brisk and successful Browns without
understanding their clear and immediate view of things, as he
had voyaged across the world and seen life touched at the edge
with the prismatic colours of romance, so now he did, with that
slow-fusing imagination of his, transmute the daily happenings
of his present existence into a delightful and — alas ! — incom-
municable dream. Even at the end, which was near, he found
yet another matter for supreme wonder, another confirmation of
a previous discovery that the essential spirit of life is indestruc-
tible and divine.

One minor cause for astonishment awaited him, as soon as the
excitement of marriage was done with and he could give co-
herent utterance to irrelevant and profane thoughts, and that
was the way in which money made money. Especially, he ex-
plained, in his own case. He could hardly understand how any
one could be induced to go out and work, when money made itself
so easy. Why, he observed, it was as easy to be a publican as to
be a sinner, and the unexpected pithiness of the remark, its
acceptance by one or two who heard it as genuine humour, induced
him to say it often. " At least," he would add, " that's what
I tell the wife, but she won't have it at all."

It was not to be expected. Doubtless a consciousness of his
dependence on her capacity came to him in time, for it was
plain to the meanest mind that hers was the directing genius of
the establishment. She it was who made a snap-offer for the
goodwill of the restaurant next door, who shut it up, gutted
the " Stormy Petrel's " jug department, cut a way through from
the private bar, abolished a dark back room and transformed it
all into a tasteful grill-room. She it was, too, who went through
the lists, wrote complaints to distillers and kept the mineral

461

462 CASUALS OF THE SEA

water dealers in terror of their lives. It was her business, it
came natural to her to tend the details of a tavern. And more-
over he was satisfied that it should be so. From time to time
he asked questions, sat watching the smooth running of the
mechanism of the house. He was happy in his way, he told her,
and she in hers. He wasn't going to be such a fool as to inter-
fere with anybody who knew their business.

It was a source of some chagrin to him, however, to think that
he had so far no expert knowledge of any trade, and this im-
pelled him to try to master this one, if only to the extent of
supervision. So he tried and found himself grateful to the train-
ing of the Little Brown Box, which had made him familiar with
the exigencies of the currency. But for the most part he let
the mechanism run on, keeping upstairs out of the way, adjust-
ing his ideas of the world in various ways. One of these was
clothes. He had drawn his thirty pounds from the shipping
office and put it under the tea-cosy one afternoon. When Nellie
found it she counted it carefully and copied the numbers of the
notes upon a piece of paper. When the notes themselves were
in the safe in the bedroom, she said:

"Why don't you buy some clothes, Hanny?"

" What's the matter with this ? " he asked, touching the neat
blue serge in which he was married.

" Nothing, but you'll want more than one suit. I've been
over your things, and you need a lot."

" Well, you buy them," he said, opening the Cambrian Daily
Leader. " I'm no 'and at that sort of thing."

" I can't buy your suits," she protested. " Underwear and
socks, yes, but not suits. You want to be measured."

" All right, old lady," he said with great good nature, " I'll
go to-morrow morning."

And when fairly into the matter of it, after having got out of
the one-suit habit, so to speak, he found it pleasant enough to
multiply his personality in tweed and serge, to note the idio-
syncrasies of the young men who came into the saloon bar and
walked with lordly airs in Oxford Street. He grew accustomed
to have clothes, in time, affecting neutral tints and inconspic-
uous design, and eventually ceased to give the matter much
thought, as other fancies took possession of his mind.

One thing he found that it was essential to have, and that
was something to do. For some days after coming back from

CASUALS OF THE SEA 463

Crwmbrla, where they were married (" that mouthful," he called
it), he had gone about lackadaisically. That had palled terribly.
Nellie insisted he should keep out of draughts and button his
coat up when he went out, for he had a habit of lounging along
with his hands in his pockets and his waistcoat showing. He
talked with Mrs. Lloyd until she returned to Neath to warm
the hearth for her husband, who was steward of one of Elder
Dempster's West African ships. And the weather being bad
and (of course) rainy, at the time, he bethought himself of read-
ing, recalling Mr. Grober and his threepenny books, or a penny
if you took them back. He told Nellie about him and his smoky
shop, his whisky and his " bitter half," as Hannibal called the
soured woman his wife.

" Poor things," said Nellie. " Easy to laugh, Han, but what
a life ! It is awful how some people live."

" Perhaps he ain't to blame," surmised Hannibal, " bein' a
square peg in a round 'ole."

So he betook himself to a shop where books were piled in an
endless and glittering variety, a shop reminding him in no
detail whatever of Mr. Grober's dingy hole, a shop full of dis-
concerting ambuscades of literature tended by discreet young
women, who puzzled him by their amazing knowledge of books.
They seemed to have read them all.

" Stories about the sea ? Yes." And they brought down a
heap. "What would you like? Pirates or history?"

He wouldn't say, ashamed to let them see how greatly he, a
married man, desired to read about pirates. He took up Treas-
ure Island.

" This any good ? " he asked, flirting the leaves over.

" Yes, it has been out some time — quite a classic," said the
young woman, and he nearly put it down again. But the word
" pirate " caught his eye on one page and he took it, together
with Westward Ho! and the Frozen Pirate.

The curious thing was that he did not notice that these stories
were in any wise improbable. That they did not happen to him
was no fault of the world, but himself. It was just accident,
that was all. They might happen even now. And as he took
up Treasure Island for the second time, and read the tale of
the doings at the " Admiral Benbow " inn, it came upon him
suddenly. " Why," he muttered, " I'm keepin' a pub, or an inn,
as he calls it ! " It was a great discovery. Here he was, keep-

464 CASUALS OF THE SEA

ing a tavern in a seaport town, with seafaring men coming in
for goes of rum (sometimes), and who could tell when a pirate
with a wooden leg would not come stumping in? Here he was
living in romance, and never thought to look at it that way.
There was the name, too, " Stormy Petrel " ! It became the pre-
occupation of his waking moments and the stuff of many dreams,
this idea of his proximity to the adventurous life of bygone days.
He would look down into the narrow street and watch the towns-
people hurrying to and fro, imagining desperate motives and law-
less schemes to be behind their haste. He longed for a man with
a wooden leg, and once as he walked down to the shore he saw
with a queer feeling of delicious horror a blind man, tapping
along the asphalt path. Surely it was Pew. Alas! the poor
wretch had a tin cup on his breast, proving he was no pirate save
upon charitable purses. So it couldn't be Pew. He told Nellie
of his fancy, alluding to the name of the house. She laughed.

" I had thought of changing it," she said, " to get a better
class of trade. The ' Glamorgan Arms,' or something like that."

" Oh, you mustn't do that, old lady," he protested. " That
would spoil it. Think! It's like a bit out of a book. The
1 Stormy Petrel.' "

She consented to let it stand, if it amused him, and busied
herself with the more practical side of the house. He insisted
she should read the book that had so seized upon his imagination,
and to please him she did so, lamenting the dearth of love in-
terest.

" They're an awful lot of ruffians," she complained. " What
on earth d'you want to read about people who are always kill-
ing somebody, Hanny? They'd all be locked up if they behaved
like that now." But she caught a little of his enthusiasm after
all, even to the extent of reporting the momentous fact that a
man with a wooden leg had drunk a glass of beer in the public
bar one afternoon.

" And me not in ! " he exclaimed, laughing at himself.

He bought a parrot, too, a grey, suspicious-looking bird from
Las Palmas, who loved warmth and squalled at everybody who
came near. No amount of soothing reiteration of " Poor Polly,
Good Polly," would soften the baleful gleam in that sombre
bird's eye. " They don't talk when they're young," he would
explain to Nellie, as they stood before the cage.

" He's awful bad tempered," Nellie would remark.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 465

" Perhaps 'e's grieving over bein' took away from 'is 'ome,"
Hannibal would suggest, and then the parrot would vent his
appalling screech, and there was nothing for it but the cloth. . . .

" I wish 'e'd learn to say ' pieces of eight,' " he would say,
coughing. It became a custom with him to go down in the
evening to the saloon bar and talk with the patrons who came
obviously from ships. Mates and engineers learned to know the
young boss, and decorative versions of his life-history passed
from ship to ship, ran through enlarged editions in foreign ports,
and came back unrecognisably romantic. It brought business,
as Nellie expressed it, and so had its uses, though Hannibal
thought little of that. It was^ very pleasant to lean over the
bar and watch the drink passing, and add his quota to the stories
of far-away ; pleasant to be able to say, " When I was in Singa-
pore," or " Yes, I saw her in New York." It gave him a cer-
tain prestige. It did not disturb these patrons that they had
heard he had been only a fireman. They only wished they could
get fixed as he had done. He was good-natured too, and was
ready to stand occasionally himself, if he knew his company.
Always he asked at some point in the conversation, " Do you
know the Caryatid? yellow funnel, black top?"

" Out of London? " a second mate would enquire.

" Ah, Billiter Lane."

" Carry passengers, don't they ? "

" Some. Not the Caryatid. Old sugar basket she was."
And he would laugh and tell them of something that happened
" while I was in her."

Always, too, he would look round to see if any one he had
known was present. It would be delightful to see Spink enter,
for instance, to see his look of sudden puzzled recognition, to
shake hands and ask him what he would drink. Ask him up-
stairs? Rather! Or Mr. Hopkins, though Mr. Hopkins did not
frequent taverns. And, strangely enough, one evening as he
came through from the grill-room he saw a familiar back. The
barmaid was opening a bottle of soda water and splashing it
into a whisky. Hannibal came along behind the bar, his eager
young face alight with pleasure. He nodded.

" Good evening, Mr. Titheradge."

" Good evening," said the other, reaching for a match and
scarcely looking up.

" Don't remember me, I suppose ? " said Hannibal, smiling.

466 CASUALS OF THE SEA

The late Third of the Caryatid regarded his host with atten-
tion and uttered a subdued and profane ejaculation.

" Why — what's to do ? " he exclaimed. " Swallowed the an-
chor?"

Hannibal nodded, enjoying his bewilderment and the polite
interest of the other customers.

Mr. Titheradge swallowed his whisky and desired information,
and Hannibal insisted he should walk upstairs and see the wife.

" Wife," muttered Titheradge, with his glassy stare. " So
you did it, then ? "

" Bet your life," grinned Hannibal, leading the way.

It was a great experience for both of them. The Third was
frankly generous in his approval of Nellie, and drank half a
bottle of whisky while he detailed his own career. He had left
the Caryatid in Liverpool and gone home for Christmas. Got
a Second's job on a Hartlepool boat — not much of a gamble —
poor grub and a Chief who behaved as if his feet hurt him —
just in to bunker — away to-morrow to Fiume, and up the Black
Sea for grain. Spink? Oh, Spink got his ticket and was away
in one of Kitty Furness's ships — forget which one — B.A. and
Rio run. He believed the Caryatid was in Calcutta on time-
charter. Awful life. He'd had some — damn glad he'd left.
Yes, the Second and Chief were still in her. And Mr. Titheradge
took another peg.

" You're pretty well fixed here," he remarked, looking round.
" Parrot, too. Quite nautical ! Some people do have luck."

" Why don't you get married too ? " asked Nellie, smiling.

" Got any sisters ? " asked Mr. Titheradge. And Hannibal
slapped his leg and burst out laughing and coughing.

" She's married," Nellie answered, tittering.

" There you are ! Just my luck ! " sighed Mr. Titheradge.

" Yes, but there's heaps of nice girls everywhere. You know
the song? " And she hummed the music-hall ditty:

There's nice girls everywhere,
Nice girls everywhere.

Mr. Titheradge, eyeing a photogravure entitled " The Garden
of Eden," which Nellie had bought as a present for Hannibal,
pursed his lips and looked sceptical.

" That's what the furnishing pirates say," he remarked.
" You get married, we do the rest."

CASUALS OF THE SEA 467

" It's worth trying," urged Hannibal.

" On twelve pounds a month ? " said the other sarcastically.

" Plenty do it on less," said Nellie.

" Well, if you hear of anything, let me know," Mr. Tither-
adge remarked. " Anything like this, I mean," and he waved
his hand round the room. " I'll be round pretty sharp, I can
tell you."

"If you love each other, it doesn't matter " began Nellie,

but the visitor put up his hand.

" Don't, Mrs. Gooderich, don't — I can't bear it — I can't
indeed. If I gave that sort of talk its right name, you'd be
shocked."

They stood side by side, looking at him, as he rose and reached
for his coat. They were sorry he felt that way. " Come down
and have a look at the Blooming dale," he said to Hannibal,
accepting a cigar. " I used to think the Caryatid was a wreck,
but I hadn't seen this packet then. She's a peach. We're in
the Prince of Wales dock, but he's not there just now."

" I will," said Hannibal.

So he did, picking his way next morning among the railway
ties and discovering Mr. Titheradge in a very warm, dark
engine-room, for the coal was thundering on the skylights,
wrestling with an old and recalcitrant reversing-engine.

" Quite like old times," he remarked, looking round for a
piece of waste.

Hannibal talked about the meeting for days, after he had
stood on the pier head and waved to the old Blooming dale as
she crawled out into the Bay one misty February morning. Nel-
lie listened to him as he went over all the incidents of his sea
life.

" Do you want to go to sea again ? " she demanded suddenly,
as she sat by a great heap of newspapers in their sitting-
room.

He looked at her, startled. The drone of the electric cars in
Oxford Street came faintly to their ears.

" No," he said vaguely, as he looked out into the little street.
" No, I don't know as I do, Nellie. Seein' the chaps and talkin's
all right, but I reckon it's the beach for me for a bit yet."

" A year, anyway," she suggested, hunting among the papers,
so that her face was hidden from him if he should turn.

" Ah," he asserted.

468 CASUALS OF THE SEA

" Oh," she said, " this is what I was looking for. This," and
she showed him an advertisement. " Why not try it ? "

It was a good advertisement in a way, an English way. A
French or Italian specialist in publicity would have lifted his
shoulders in despair of the consummate banality of it. An
American of the same profession would have said it lacked punch.
They would all be right; but for the English, it was a good
advertisement. It proved that Minnie, who had composed it,
who had, through Mrs. Wilfley, received twenty pounds for it
(Mrs. Wilfley merely raking off a trifling fiver), had learned
the essentials of the art, and had, moreover, a certain propen-
sity for it. It was plain that she had studied under that culti-
vated lady the science of " Commercial Psychology," the chair
of which Sir Anthony Gilfillan had endowed at London Uni-
versity. The fruitfulness of her study was apparent in the fact
that she caught Nellie, and Nellie was sharp enough in her own
line. She knew beer was a deleterious mess in most cases, con-
taining saline stuff to aggravate thirst instead of allaying it;
that whisky was faked with potato spirit, and port was doctored
with log-wood; but she did not think that there was aught of
guile in that advertisement. It was headed in exquisite Kelm-
scott type, Are you anxious about some one you love?

She was. Well, was she lying awake thinking of some precious
soul who was all in all to her? Did she note, with the piercing
eye of affection, symptoms that none but she could see? Was
she afraid to exaggerate some possible trifle by speaking of it?

Did she realise this risk?

What would she say to herself, when it was too late?

Would she ever forgive herself if she failed to try every rem-
edy?

Perhaps the doctor had said nothing. Oh, yes, but with all
respect for the whole medical profession, was it not human to
err? Was it not madness to believe in the infallibility of a
poor mortal being like a doctor? Why, it was gross irreligion
savouring almost of papistry.

Humanum est errare.

So far the clever spacing and arresting type had carried Nel-
lie along, but now the advertisement got down to business and
the type got down to two-line pica. And when a modern adver-
tisement, composed by a student of Commercial Psychology, gets
down to business, the reader begins to shake in his or her shoes.

CASUALS OF THE SEA 469

Nellie shrank as from a whip when she first read it. It was
gross irreligion, folly, to place a blind confidence in an erring
human practitioner, was it not? But what was it, then, to neg-
lect the aid held out to you by those who had devoted their lives
to your welfare? It was not merely irreligion, it was not merely
folly, it was criminal neglect! In all solemnity, and with a
full consciousness of the gravity of their words, the proprietors
of Fochaber's Cough Eliminator had no hesitation in describ-
ing it as criminal neglect. No money need be sent, no respon-
sibility was incurred, by writing to-day for a sample bottle. The
poorest had no excuse, while the spread of education enabled
the most humble of their brothers and sisters to learn the glad
tidings of great joy which had been brought to many by this
incomparable preparation.

It was a very good advertisement.

" What do you think ? " Nellie asked, anxiously watching
Hannibal's face as his eyes travelled down the page and rested
finally upon the picture, a woman with streaming hair, kneeling
by a bedside, entitled, " Too Late." Hannibal put the paper
down, obviously perturbed.

" Me, my cough, you mean ? Oh, it's nothing."

The same thought flashed through their minds at the same
instant. That was just what the advertisement said, and then
— " too late."

" It won't do any harm just to try it," she ventured, and he
nodded. " All right, old lady. Go ahead."

The afternoon was fine, the first of a series of fine spring
days when the white clouds raced across the blue sky and dis-
appeared behind the green hills over the town, when the sea
sparkled and curled under the whip of the westerly wind. Nel-
lie went to a druggist's shop and purchased a bottle of Focha-
ber's Eliminator. It was in a tasteful pasteboard box, wrapped
with testimonials, and directions in thirty-nine languages, and
had a Government seal on one end. Minnie had done the work
for her employers most thoroughly and well. Mrs. Wilfley had
told no untruth when she said to guests at her new flat in the
Temple, an eyrie overlooking the Thames, that some of Mrs.
Briscoe's writings, like her own, though not to be named, had
been translated into as many languages as the Scriptures? And
while Mrs. Wilfley smiled and Minnie looked out upon the deli-
cate Thames nocturne that evening, Nellie and Hannibal, in their

470 CASUALS OF THE SEA

own sitting-room over the bar of the " Stormy Petrel/' carefully
removed the polyglottic wrappings of the bottle of Fochaber's
Eliminator, and gazed with a simple speechless awe upon the
mystic bottle within, as though it had contained a god. For it
was no use trying to treat the matter lightly. There was no
badinage or frivolous jesting about Fochaber's. The innermost
wrapper was devoted to symptoms and medical terms. Pleurisy,
Nellie read, was either diaphragmatic or interlobular. In either
case prevention was better than cure. Beware of the cough, that
dry cough. They looked at each other. Was Hannibal's cough
dry? " Sometimes I spit stuff," he remarked.

" But it's generally dry," she argued, and he nodded.

And the next day he was better. He had been for a good
swinging walk round to Oystermouth and back, and eaten a
hearty tea. He felt better. They exchanged smiles and con-
gratulations over the breakfast table.

" Wasn't it a good job I thought of it? " she said.

" Rather. I'll go on with it," he returned. And he did.
Three bottles at half a crown each were purchased and used,
and each time after a dose he felt better. He went out for
walks, visited neighbours, looked up chance acquaintances on
the ships, and amused himself devising adventurous happenings
on the way. In time he would be all right. And Nellie regis-
tered a vow that she would write to Fochaber's and tell them
what she owed them. It would be only right.

So time passed on, and with the coming of summer Hannibal
did to all seeming improve, though Nellie thought it best for
him to take his medicine regularly, in case of relapse. They
paid a visit to Neath and saw Mrs. Lloyd and her husband, the
steward, and Hannibal learned something of the ins and outs
of that department of life. And then an event of great im-
portance to Nellie happened.

Mrs. Gooderich Senior came down on a visit.

Hannibal met her at the station in a lordly way, and quite
overwhelmed her with his fine new clothes, his watch-chain,
his moustache, his cab, his cuff-links, and his cigar, which last
made him cough. Was this Hanny? Was it possible that this
was the dirty little rapscallion who used to go fishing in Littler's
Pond?

There was a suspicion of smugness about his mother's face
nowadays. The Facts, having bowled over her moral sense, had

CASUALS OF THE SEA 471

gone on to smooth out the wrinkles of existence to such an ex-
tent that Mrs. Gooderich Senior was in danger of becoming
supercilious. She grew sceptical even of the genuineness of
those people who couldn't make ends meet. She told Hannibal
that the working-classes were a lot better off than the middle-
classes, which smelled to Hannibal like a piece of Minnie's
philosophy. She approved of Nellie, who was a little uncer-
tain of herself just then, and laughed without any apparent
reason, and she gave an unmistakable verdict in favour of Foeha-
ber's — why, it was advertised all over London. She heard Mrs.
Wilfley say Fochaber's had paid fifty thousand in London alone
to the space-brokers. Think of that!

She stayed two months, winning Nellie's confidence and en-
joying the sea air. Sitting on the pier at Mumbles one serene
evening, Mrs. Gooderich suddenly realised how extremely for-
tunate her life had been since she had relinquished her uncom-
promising sense of honesty. And yet, what was wrong with her
life? Nothing. She lived with her daughter, who had mar-
ried well; she had been staying with her son, who ha J married
still more well. What could be more respectable than her
existence in Tedworth Square? True, she did not dare to inter-
fere or even show herself too much when Minnie's fine friends
came. She contented herself with tending the endless needs of
Anthony Briscoe, whose dark eyes gazed up at her occasionally
from the cradle. Even there hers was a back seat, for the
trained nurse resented suggestions. After all, she had only to
be quiet, and life flowed on smoothly month after month, un-
assailed by money troubles. She read Mrs. Wilfley 's articles in
Sunday Words or in the daily papers, and felt uplifted. She
read novels, " old favourites " like Left With a Trust, and all
the Pansy stories. And she and Nellie found a point of joyous
contact in a common appreciation of Allen Raine. Nellie, for
all her shrewd practical business sense, revelled in the stories
of Allen Raine. So did Mrs. Gooderich Senior when she be-
came acquainted with them. Together they smiled on Hanny's
fancies for pirates and dead men's chests, and they gave the
parrot the benefit of much elegant conversation concerning " she "
and " he " and what " they " did in the historical present of ro-
mance. They attended chapel together, and enjoyed in a mild
way the spiritual ecstasy of comfortable prayer.

No. As she sat there on the pier that evening, Mary Goode-

472 CASUALS OF THE SEA

rich felt that her lines had fallen upon pleasant places, and that
she had earned a little rest.

And so, I think, she had.

It was in September that a sudden idea came to Nellie as she
sat at a table covered with papers. She was enclosing a cheque
for the fire insurance of the premises, when a little list of life
premiums fell on her lap from the sheaf of papers in her hand.
She looked up.

"Hanny?"

Hannibal came out of the depths of Roderick Random with a
grunt of enquiry.

" You ought to insure your life ! "

"Me?"

" Yes. You see, the sooner you start the better. Look here.

It says " He bent his head down to hers. " it says,

1 Age next birthday twenty, premium for two hundred pounds,
two pounds five a year. Redeemable when you're fifty at three
hundred pounds.' Hanny! Just think what a nice little nest-
egg that'll be for — for you know ! "

Hannibal, his hands on his knees, looked down at his feet.

" All right, old lady," he said soberly. " I don't reckon that'll
break us."

" It says any doctor, you see ? " She pointed. " You've got
to see a doctor, of course."

He nodded, sunk once more in his chair and Roderick Random.

An intense conviction had taken hold of his mind as he
steadily made his way through tale after tale of adventure and
mystery; a conviction that, when he might least expect it, the
True Romance would sweep into his existence. He would let
the book slide, and stare away into vacancy, seeking for he
knew not what. Life was a wonderful thing! Who could tell
what might not happen to him, if he only had the wit to seize
the chance?

" It'll come," he would say to himself, " it'll come, if I wait."

So it did, embodied unostentatiously in a very young man,
whose overcoat buttons fell away from the holes and disclosed
a uniform of stark newness. That was a raw October night, a
week before Nellie suddenly decided to go and see the doctor,
for various reasons.

" You'd think I only needed a big brass helmet to be the hero
of the piece," said the young man in facetious allusion to his

CASUALS OF THE SEA 473

uniform. "And when I tell you," he added, leaning confi-
dentially across the bar, " that I'm only the Third Mate of
her, you'll wonder what the Old Man must be like when he's
got his war-paint on, eh ? "

" Passenger boat? " asked Hannibal.

" Not on your life ! " The young man was evidently con-
fronted by a situation beyond his scope. He drank a little more
whisky. " Have you ever seen a wind-bag with a propeller ? "

" Not me."

" Well, come down and look at the Beile Glas — she's in the
North Dock. She's worth a squint. I joined her at Clydebank,
and she was called the mystery ship up there. ' What's her
cargo ? ' says I to the rigger. * Wine for the owner,' says he.
' That's why she carries electric windlass and winches, steam
would spoil the bouquet of the ninety-three.' All piff, o' course,
but there you are. A thousand tons, four masts, Yankee rig, a
six-foot propeller, electric lights, wireless, and the finest ac-
commodation I've ever seen. She's a floating Pullman!"

And it was all true. Hannibal went down the rain-swept
Wind Street the next day and saw her.

She was of grey steel, with four tall masts carrying enormous
booms. Her deck-houses were of teak and glittering with
varnish, German silver, and electric light reflectors. One blade
of an undeniable propeller stuck above the water. To add to
the mystery, a board marked " No Admittance " hung forbid-
dingly by the gangway. There was no reservation in favour
of those " on business," no suggestion that a man might quite
legitimately stroll up and ask for a friend, say the Third Mate.
It was as plain as one of the Ten Commandments, as terse as an
act of God. " No Admittance."

He returned to the " Stormy Petrel " thinking of treasure-
seekers, forgotten lands, rich owners, and mouldering maps. It
new in his mind, this conviction that he had found a romance.
"Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!" Each evening that talk-
ative young man in the shining uniform leaned over the bar, and
smiled, and added fresh fuel to the fire of his imagination, mys-
terious hints — sealed orders — stores for two years on board
— all British crew — a machine gun — tons of ammunition —
marked tinned meat on the manifest of course, ha-ha! — and so
on. And as the days passed, a crazy scheme took shape in Han-
nibal's mind, and the two heads leaned closer together, the

474 CASUALS OF THE SEA

round, dark, bullet head of the Londoner and the long, high-
crowned cranium of the youth, who came, obviously enough, from
Londonderry.

" Sure, man, it can be done," the latter was saying. " We're
going off to the buoy about twelve. The Captain, who hasn't
come back from Plymouth yet, is to join us about that time.
If you come down about seven, say, and walk aboard as if you'd
business with us, you understand? Seven, say. I must run
now. The Stores have come for the Captain to-day — con-
signed from Plymouth."

" I'll be down," said Hannibal.

It was a simple . scheme of his, simple, plausible, and stark
mad. He would dress himself in his old clothes, slip down to
the Beile Glas, and get the Third Mate to show him round, and
then — trust to luck to stow himself away. He must seize this
chance to swing on to the car of True Romance as it passed
him. He must find out the tale of this strange visitant. The
Beile Glas! Stores from Plymouth! Sealed orders! Lummy!

He went round whistling softly to himself, watching the clock.

"Going out to-night, dear?" said Nellie casually, and he
jumped.

" Oh, I may," he remarked.

" I saw Dr. Rhys Evans to-day," she chatted. " He's com-
ing round to-morrow morning."

"I see," said Hannibal. "Where's my old overcoat?" he
asked.

" Whatever for ? "

" I'm going down to 'ave a look at a ship, see? Makes the
clo's so dirty."

" I gave it away months ago," she told him. " What do you
want to go messing about ships for ? " she queried fretfully.

" Well, I can if I like, can't I ? " he answered, a little cross.

" Oh, go if you want to " she said, and he waited for the

word " dear," but it did not come. He felt aggrieved. She
took no interest. He took his usual coat and cap and went out.
It was already seven o'clock. He must hurry. He ran down
Wind Street and full into a keen autumnal gale sweeping along
the Port Tennant Road. And when he reached the dock-side
he was in a bath of perspiration.

At first he could see nothing. The stretch of water where
the grey ship had been was clear, sparkling, and empty. Then

CASUALS OF THE SEA 475

he understood. That dull patch in the shadow of the ware-
houses, a patch with a single light hanging near the bow, was
the Beile Glas, at the buoy. He was too late.

He stood for a moment, benumbed of brain, slowly rousing
from the curious aberration that had possessed him. He sat
down on one of the bitts and tried to think. What was to be
done? He could not go back just now. He wanted to see the
Beile Glas go out. It all crystallised down to that in time. He
must see the Beile Glas go out. It seemed to him, as he looked
across at the silent ship, that she held more than a general
mystery. She held part of himself, a part he was about to
relinquish, a certain delicate sense of illusion, and she was tak-
ing it out to sea, to lose it on the trackless waters where he
had found it. It was in obedience to this feeling that he waited
on; and when, about nine o'clock, he heard some commotion
near her and a tug came out of the gloom, he turned and ran
along the road again, far out on the pier where the red light
burns, so that he might see her pass. It was cold and very
dark there, mysteriously cold and dark, the wind blowing through
the timber piles and the black water moving unseen with an ooze
and a slap below him. Several times he shivered and coughed,
but he took no heed. He was looking at the town lights round
the bay, at the dark hills touched with the crimson glare of the
steel works over by Landore. What a pity, he murmured, what
a pity he had missed her! Here was a treasure-ship going out
on the tide, a treasure ship, and he had missed her. He would
be out of all the fun after all, out of the fights with savages and
buccaneers. He had hoped to see them swing at the end of
those tremendous booms. Of course he would be under hatches
during the fight, but when all the ammunition had been sent up
and it came to the final rush, he would grab a cutlass and . . .

He became aware of her, a trembling blackness in the shadows,
a faint pulsation, communicating itself to the timbers on which
he stood. She drew nearer, looming large above him, her tall
masts blood-red in the light of the lantern, the smoke of the
tug drifting through her rigging like the smoke of battle. He
saw dark forms on her decks going back and forth, he heard the
clang of a bell, a gruff voice, and the soft purr of a dynamo. A
shrill whistle sounded as she cleared, and he strained his eyes
to see the last of her as she receded. She was gone, gone with
her secret and his, and a sigh escaped him. It was gone forever,

476 CASUALS OF THE SEA

that foolish idea of his, that iridescent rainbow edging of
things, and he must try and remember. She was gone and part
of him with her, out into the night.

He bought a paper as he passed through Castle Square, and
saw among the brief paragraphs that filled the front page the
announcement that " The Special Survey ship Beile Glds was
due to sail that evening for Punta Arenas, under sealed orders."

Several times he had to pause, with bowed head, while a
paroxysm of coughing swept him, and he felt conscious of a
" pain somewhere inside."

Nellie met him on the landing.

"Where have you been?" she asked, amazed. "It's past
eleven o'clock."

" What I said," he replied huskily. " Went down to see a
ship off. Everything all right."

" I was getting frightened," she reproached him. " You've
got a cold again. You better take some of that stuff." And
she went slowly across the bedroom to the medicine chest to
get the bottle of Fochaber's Eliminator. She always kept it in
the house now.

" I'll be all right in the morning," he croaked.

But in the morning he was anything but all right. He lay in
bed very ill indeed, while Nellie, after giving him some more
Fochaber's, decided that Doctor Rhys Evans might as well see
him too. He could prescribe for the cold and examine him for
the insurance company at the same time.

The doctor, who was young enough to enjoy his own sense
of humour, came in casually about eleven o'clock. To Nellie's
surprise Hannibal had not risen at all. He did not know what
ailed him. All he could tell her was that, if he lay on his left
side, he could hardly breathe; if he lay on his right side it was
not much better; if he lay on his back he could not cough,
and was nearly strangled; and when he got into position for
coughing, he thought he was going to die.

Doctor Rhys Evans came in jauntily from his runabout car,
quite at ease with himself and the world. Nellie's description
of her husband's cough, together with the talk of insurance
policies, had not led him to expect anything serious. " Sweet-
hearts still, and worrying about everything, as they do at such
a time." So it shaped itself in the brain under his silk hat. But

CASUALS OF THE SEA 477

when he reached the door of Hannibal's room his expression
changed. He stood stock still for a moment and sniffed, and
Nellie behind him was puzzled. Then he drew off his motoring
gloves, shot his cuffs, felt in his waistcoat pocket for his ther-
mometer, and sat down at the bedside. He supported Hanni-
bal's shoulders with pillows, so that he could breathe more easily;
he took a stethoscope from his hat and listened for a long time
to the stertorous chest. He leaned over to catch the odour of his
breath.

"What are you giving him?" he asked sharply, swinging
round upon Nellie, who jumped.

" This," she said, a sudden fear gripping her heart, as she
held up the bottle of Fochaber's. The doctor took it, read
the label, and without any apology flung it with emphasis and
precision into the grate, where it shattered.

" Get a fire lighted here," he ordered. " Got any more of
that stuff in the house? "

She paused in her trembling flight and turned to shake her
head.

" That rubbish is poison ! " he said, when she returned. " You
must get me towels and a tub of hot water."

She brought up the servant and one of the girls to help her,
and together they got the things needed.

" Hot-water bottles, everything hot in the house," he com-
manded. When the tub came, he stood the shivering Hannibal
in it, scalding his thin legs with the liquid until they were fiery
red. Hot towels were draped over the young man as he sat
there on the edge of the bed, his head drooped on his chest.

" Now in with you ! " said the doctor. And into the hot bed
Hannibal was shoved, and banked high with blankets.

" It's Lobar Pneumonia," said the doctor to Nellie, after-
wards, " and I may be able to get him over. He has no con-
stitution, you see. If it gets a firm hold on him he'll go down
like a pack of cards "

" I thought Fochaber's was good for " she began.

" It's a lying swindle," he returned. " I'd like to see every
bottle of it pitched over the Mumbles Head."

" But the advertisement " she protested.

" Pooh ! " said the doctor. " Advertisement ! They'll say
anything. You should have more sense."

478 CASUALS OF THE SEA

She looked at him with wide, scared eyes and an expression
on her face as though she was saying, " Yes, yes, all my fault.
Hit me hard. It was my fault." He looked at her.

" Get some one, sister or some one, to stay with you," he
suggested. " You understand ? "

And Mrs. Lloyd arrived in the afternoon.

The crisis came quickly. His system, never very vigorous,
had been silently but definitely undermined by his sickness in
the East, his lungs were full of coal dust, and his stomach
deranged by the opium and mercury and formaldehyde of that
beneficent proprietary, Fochaber's Eliminator.

" Good heavens ! " said the doctor to Mrs. Lloyd. " And they
wanted to insure his life ! "

" Get some one else down," he told her another time. " You
must keep her quiet. You understand? "

And so Mrs. Gooderich Senior left Tedworth Square and
journeyed down to Swansea again. When Nellie saw her mother-
in-law safely into the house, she retired from the sick room.
" Don't you worry now," said the doctor. " He'll be round
sooner than you are. He'll soon pick up when we have something
to tell him."

But to Mrs. Lloyd and Mrs. Gooderich Senior he reiterated
his doubts. " Like a pack of cards," lie repeated. " He has no
ballast to carry him through a thing like this."

And early in the following week, on a day when Winter
rushed through the streets shaking at the casements and sending
pieces of paper high over the roofs, that was just how he did
go down, like a pack of cards. He lay there motionless, his eyes
closed, the leaping flames of the fire illuminating his face with
a sudden fugitive and disturbing radiance. He lay there think-
ing in an absolute mental calm, looking out upon the little
ocean of his life, its currents and storms forgotten, merely pon-
dering upon its ultimate utility. What was the good of this
life? he asked, without rancour or impertinence, of the silent
Fates. He was not complaining. He had had a good time, and
the world was an astonishing place, well worth a visit. But
surely there was something else. Life wasn't just a museum,
through which one wandered, delighted with the strange things
all around one, going out finally into the night, nothing done.
One left something behind. Where was he? He had seen that

CASUALS OF THE SEA 479

dim ship pass out, bearing in her heart his Lost Illusion. One
odd fancy took him, and his mother, watching his face, saw a
slight creasing of the cheeks as he smiled, a fancy that had
been the beginning of the end. He was going piece by piece.
Here he was lying quite peacefully on his back, and Nellie was
— ah ! that was hard lines. Would he not see her again ? They
had got on so well for their short time. She loved him, looked
after him, understood that idea of his that already floated away.
After all, he was not cut out for practical business, not cut
out . . .

He became aware of a subdued murmur near him, near the
door. Some one was bending over him, touching his hands.
He heard his mother speaking in his ear, and then quite sud-
denly, and almost unreasonably, he found himself smiling and
feeling glad. Good! A boy! Lummy! The murmur subsided
and quiet reigned, broken only by the distant noise of the trams
and the crackling of the fire. Was this the reason, then? An-
other piece broken away. Soon he would be ready to go out
on his own quiet adventure. That was how he had grown to
look at it. Here in this life, you were up against hard practical
efficient people and things, with occasional exasperating glimpses
into another world. No use grumbling; while you were here
you had to fall in line. His mistake had been that he had tried
to live in both worlds at once. No good. But now, out there
alone? He would see.

Sometimes, during that evening, he grieved quietly for the
absence of Nellie, who had been so benign a pillow when he
was in danger of suffering from the ceaseless indurations of
business. And from that he slipped into a renewed conscious-
ness of this obscure joy, this scarce-won fatherhood, seeing it
as a great light afar off, swinging dizzily in space, a light on the
coast he was leaving behind. Little by little the light grew
dim, his hold on reality slackened, and he babbled of nameless
things — things that had lain in the depths of his mind for long
years, words that were like empty shells of long-dead ideas.
Forgotten baby talk, like strings of feathery weed, fluttered
from his lips and troubled the scarcely-comprehending solicitude
of his mother. And sometimes he wept, feeling lost in the dark.
" Sealed orders," he would murmur. " Going out with scaled
orders." And then " Pieces of eight ! " She wished she could

480 CASUALS OF THE SEA

help him, but he had always been such a tranquil child, thought-
ful too, and secretive. She sat at his bedside, an anxious woman
verging upon old age. And he was dying, her son was dying.
I doubt very much if she realised it.

She had never seen any one die. When her husband had been
carried home, the melodramatic trappings of his transition had
covered like a gorgeous pall the central sordid fact. So, too,
with Bert, who had died with eclat, six thousand miles away,
leaving behind for her memory to feed on not even a body or a
funeral, only a blue War Office form and a misspelt name in a
newspaper. She knew these things as she knew of events in a
book. Here was a son dying before her eyes. Already he had
gone off to the buoys, and in a little while he would go over the
bar. She did not realise it.

I don't suppose Mrs. Gooderich Senior changed much after
this experience. She was now " set," as she said. Her blue
eyes were no longer the dark blue of the days when the brisk
young baker's man touched her rustic heart. Her blue eyes
were nearer green now, flecked with grey, and regarding you
equably from a region of peace, a sort of neutral ground com-
mon to great sinners, great saints, and great sufferers. It is
really, only we are loath to give it its right name, a species of
ennui. A human soul is limited. It grows unresponsive after
a certain number of excitations, and we call it peace, whereas
it is really fatigue, a kind of hysteresis. Mrs. Gooderich had
suffered, and her mind could respond no more. She could not
transmute her sorrow into exquisite art, nor could she share
the finer ecstasies of the Church. She felt that, after all, com-
fort and freedom from money trouble were the cardinal things
of life, and even the spectacle of her son dying did not disturb
this conviction. He belonged, moreover, to another woman. She
had not understood that wild breakaway when he went to sea.
Why should he want to go to sea? His Uncle George had dis-
approved. Was Amelia married now, she wondered. She had
heard that she was walking out with a water clerk, whom she
had met in Billiter Lane. . . .

She was lost in a maze of conjectures, this woman verging on
old age, when she noticed the thin hand on the coverlet making
a gesture of throwing something away.

" What is it, dear? " she whispered.

" Cast off, cast off," he muttered. " Sealed orders." And

CASUALS OF THE SEA 481

while she was wondering if she had not better call some one, he
smiled and went out into the night.

It is spring again in Abertawe, and the white clouds flit mer-
rily across the blue sky over the white-lipped waters of the
Bay. There is a joyous bluster in the wind that races around
past Oystermouth, and rustles in the trees up Sketty way, whis-
pering " Youth ! Youth ! " All the world is green and glorious
upon the hillsides, and in the lanes lovers are walking to and fro.
And in the " Stormy Petrel," as I see it in my minds eye, there
is that incomparable woman in rich black, and all the prettier
in the neat widow's cap, superintending with unremitting care
the red fragment of humanity in the cradle and the business he
will some day inherit. I sit and see it, in my mind's eye, and
think. It is an excellent business.

Mrs. Gooderich Senior is gone back long ago to the comfort
of Tedworth Square. I think it was Fochaber's upon which
they differed chiefly, for Mrs. Gooderich Senior, having heard
of it at first hand, would believe no ill of Fochaber's. Be that
as it may, she is gone back to London, to the discreet household
in Tedworth Square. There she is, it is true, somewhat a
cypher, save when Captain Briscoe comes home for a week-end.
She and he are united in admiration of the astonishing money
to be earned by writing advertisements. Sometimes Mrs. Wil-
fley, occupied upon a new book entitled The Souteneur, will call,
ineffably affable, and talking heart to heart will tell Mrs. Goode-
rich some of her spiritual divagations. And Anthony Gilfillan
is a fine boy. It will not be long before Tedworth Square for-
gets the " Stormy Petrel " and the pretty widow who visits a
grave out at Port Tennant Cemetery every Sunday.

But for me, I have not forgotten, and I think that when the
spring is vet a little more advanced, I shall run down to Abertawe.
I should like to make sure that Nellie, in spite of what she says,
has really given up all idea of marrying again.

THE IND

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